19
Voxera
7y

My first dev was a small pascal application that my dad used in his job to calculate profitability of their rental machines.

Adding up interests, workshop costs and salaries an finally splitting all shared costs according to each items turnover.

Before this my dad did this by hand using an calculator with a paper printout and it usually took around 3 days with interruptions.

With my application he entered the numbers in a grid like interface and all fixed costs in a settings view and hit calculate. Took around 30 minutes.

And if he got updated figures he just loaded the monthly figures from file, changed as needed and got the new numbers in less than 1-2 minutes instead of starting all over.

This was 1987 and personal computers was just finding its way into business.

Comments
  • 1
    This sounds so amazing, I was learning to walk and you were programming. Have heard so much about Pascal, what exactly is it for?
  • 2
    @cpt-ado Its a general purpose language like basic or c.

    Its not as popular today but in the 80s it was very large.
  • 0
    @Voxera guess it is a little outdated now?
  • 1
    @cpt-ado still in use under the name delphi and still available in gcc under *nix.

    But with less users it has as far as I know not evolved ad much as c# or java and it does not have as much extra libraries or extensions as python or js so yes it probably would feel dated today.
  • 0
    @Voxera I'll add it to my list of unpractical stuff to dedicate time to and check it out someday. Do you still used? Even if only out of longing?
  • 1
    @cpt-ado not really, I still have most of the programs for nostalgia but c# is so much more powerful so there is no real use of going back.

    And pascal was not my first lang either, I started with basic then pascal, visual basic, some c (under linux), then c#.

    And along this, javascript, tsql, bash, f#, perl, php, lotus script (internal lotus notes lang), vbscript and jscript and possibly some I forgot ;)
  • 1
    @Voxera that is one sexy list. Hopefully, in time, I'll have a list like that to brag about in front of girls.
  • 0
    @Voxera wow, this stuff takes me back. I attempted some of this stuff very superficially (and probably closer to the early 1990s) but never really got into it at the time.
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