dBase II was a handly tool.
dBase II was a lot of fun and allowed me to use files like I never did with BASIC. There were all kinds of cool stuff which I had to manually program in Basic like, sorting and indexing but which I could do with just one keyword: sort or if I wanted to index a file: index on. Although I could do lots of things with dBase II, it was still the backwoods when it came to creating reports. All I could do was to use ASCII characters as separators which was very tedious to do. dBaseIII changed all that when it came out with cool formatting stuff. One could draw boxes and I got crazy with it for a while. When programming, I used a very handy but difficult editor which came with MS-DOS, edlin. The one good thing about it was that it came bundled with MS-DOS and was quite easy to use. I was quite happy with it until a friend of mine introced me to the Norton Editor which was way more cool than edlin. With the Norton Editor I could have two editing windows where I could copy and paste code. The Norton Editor was also small so I could just keep it in one diskette with the other tools that I used to write programs.They say "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed is king". I suppose that is true in more ways than one. Since I knew a little more about programming, I could make a little money by giving lessons which I did for a while and I used BASIC to introduce beginners to the joys of computer programming. On one class where I trained personnel from a local bank, after several lectures on the basics of computer programming like variables and operations, I asked them to write a small program to indicate if they had grasped the concepts of BASIC computer programming as it related to their work. Most of them were using Visicalc to do their worksheets and it was a great boost from manual computation using paper columnar worksheets.
No one had the inclination to do anything that involved thinking outside their usual day to day work so I was kind of placed in an embarassing situation of not having taught them anything after several sessions. At this time, computers were not really welcome in the work place because of the notion that they would render people obsolete so, there is a strong need to show that personal computers were great tools for personal productivity. This is easier said than done and many people in the workplace had a secret fear of these new intelligent interlopers. I therefore had to come up with something that would demonstrate the helpfulness of personal computers and also to bolster my status as someone who knew what he was talking about.
Asking one participant to point out the one thing that he could do with his Visicalc but which was somehow also tedious and he said he found it tedious and time-consuming to make amortization tables for loan applicants. Here was an opportunity for me to make converts of skeptics and I asked for the details regarding this task. He gave me the different interacting components like
- Principal amount
- Term of the loan
- Interest rate
- Dates: starting and maturity
- Type of payment (monthly/semi-monthly/quarterly etc)
Cool blogs basking in the blog park. Visit these pages:
- Creation, life, consciousness
- Dennis Bryan S. Villarin
- Lilliputs Flowers
- Activists Reunion
- Underdogs World
posted by underdog @ 8:04 AM
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