Ice Cream Jonsey wrote:Let's have your unabridged work history, Commander.
Mostly I skated by.
Worked for two shops, one a mailing company, the other a hardware maker but both used assembly language and I wasn't good enough at it then.
Worked for a regional paint company but I didn't fit.
Worked for a company that mixed colors for plastics but I didn't fit.
That covers my first year.
Found a job via Job Service (the fancy name for the employment office) as a combined bookkeeper and programmer for a real estate broker and tax service on the edge of Los Angeles County; the place was only two blicks from the Orange County line. It was in La Mirada, which is as far east as you can go and still be in LA County. There were two ways to get to and from work, take RTD bus on Rosecrans Blvd in L.A. County or walk four blocks into O.C. and catch an OCTD bus.
I learned so much. Was using a program in basic on an apple 2 to handle my boss' checking accounts. The sort program was horrible; sorting 100 records took 45 minutes, half because the Apple II was slow, half because the sort was badly done. I wasn't even trying that hard, but I rewrote the sort using a simple bubblesort and cut the sort time in half.
The program listed checks one field per line, e.g. date, check number, payee, amount, memo, and blank line, which means when we printed out the checks it did about 10 per page, down the page. Well, at one point I was having trouble figuring out something it was doing, so I wrote a quick & dirty display mode, printing date, check, payee, memo, and amount on one line, then at the bottom of the page it skipped one line and totalled the page. One day my boss came out, looked at the q&d printout I'd created, and she says to me, "how come we're not doing it like this?" Well, I don't need a 2x4 to hi me over the head, I changed the report format.
We later discovered a problem with the arithmetic, there was an error in the floating point routines of Applesoft Basic, the calculations were wrong. so I did a workaround. All the numbers were multiplied by 100, then stored as an integer. When displaying or printing the number, I would split it to show it with the part divided by 100 and a decimal point inserted. Since all arithmetic was integer, it eliminated the math error.
We did so much work my boss decided to buy an IBM clone. A local computer store built it, 2 floppy drives 256k memory, probably $800. In 1982 dollars. I had a large collection of pirated software so I supplied Lotus 1-2-3. Took one of our files and copied it over from the Apple II to the IBM via the serial port. Tried using the sort function, and it looked like nothing happened but I was wrong. I tried it again and discovered what had happened.
The group of checks that took 45 minutes to sort on an Apple II and 22 minutes after I rewrote the sort routine, took
two seconds to sort on an IBM PC clone using Lotus 1-2-3. I started loading even more records to work with. We had the computer 2 weeks before my boss had to boost the memory on the machine to 640K because I was overloading it.
I got to be able to store an entire year's check records for a particular checking account - she had about ten - in one spreadsheet file. (On the Apple Ii we were lucky if the checking account program could handle 2 months of records before being overloaded.)
We eventually installed a hard drive. Then my boss got her own computer so she could be looking at the numbers. I taught her how to use Lotus 1-2-3. We were each at our computer working on different files, and I was explaining how she would load a different account using the slash commands, but before I can even ask her if she saved what she was doing she did the load new worksheet command so fast she blew two hours of work in two seconds. (Lotus asks if you want to quit if you have made changes to your spreadsheet, but does not ask before loading a new sheet.)
It was at that point she understood why I was so anal retentive about having backup copies of files. She learned not to make that mistake agan and why to save what you are doing regularly.
Later we discovered a problem. We had a spreadsheset with a whole year's worth of checks for one account, about 400, and it would not balance, it was off by 1c from her statement. Now we'd probably ignored it except the concern was that did we have something in Lotus like the error in Applesoft Basic. We both agreed I would have to reconcile the computer record manually against her bank statement, and that we weren't concerned with the 1c error, we were concerned with
why thre was a 1c error.
A few hours later I found it. One of her checks was written for $20 but the cents was sligthly off and the bank read it as $20.01. So, basically I took $25 worth of my time - since I was paid by the hour - to find out why we had a 1c error that technically we werent even interested in. It also, because it was correct, gave us more confidence in Lotus 1-2-3's accuracy.
I worked there four years until my family moved to DC. That's thru 1987 or so. The WIFI here at the rehab hospital is out and I'm using my Windows tablet tethered to the WIFI on my cell phone and don't know how long either device will last so I have to cut this short. More later.