Hello - Old Dinosaur here (1 Viewer)

Hello all

I have lurked as a guest here about two years and benefited in great ways from the knowledge here. So, yesterday, amidst yet another one of Access's odd limitations (Mind you, they only seem odd to me I am sure), and find a solid solution in the hit list point here yet again, it was time for me to join and show my tribute to the site.

Yes, it is true, a bit of searching, and you will find out I am a commercial developer. Please do not let that dissuade you. Even career programmers must eat, and, learn new directions

I have been coding in the Access VBA world about 3.5 years now, and I have produced a number of small to medium access projects at work for our systems architecture team (Outsourcing companies are cheap - they will have you write your own vs. buying a perfectly good solution). Mostly DB stuff on a network with a SHarePunt Backend so we could all have central data we generated proposals and financial sheets from.

My latest product development (My name) is probably one of the biggest tracking and delivery subsystems I have done in a decade or longer. (No, I didn't link to it, I don't do that sort of thing- this isn't it's audience)

I am not new to programming unless one looks at it in a geological pov I wrote my first commercial assembler program in 1978. yes, it was on mainframe, as nothing else really existed yet, no, not even a relational data base methodology. That was just a gleam in someone's eye back then.. Ah the days of candle light, and carrier pigeons

In my main employ of the past 20 years, I've done OS builds thru design infrastructure and data centers (Mainframe layouts, SAN Virtual Tape, Network requirements). But oh my goodness, do I like writing code - Yep, it's a pastime ..

Now, I am sure you might be a tad skeptical, but if folks need some corroboration, PM me I assure you am well behaving and no-ego bound - I have to be - Microsofty and my copy of Access conspire at night to change things to keep me stupid

A bit later today, I'll post a subscription to help the support aspect.

Cheers, and I'm sure I'll post something else.. And thanks for being a great Access resource.

DistilliTrak said:

Access conspire at night to change things to keep me stupid

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LOL....

that's what they do?

I thought it was me....

Welcome to AWF...

Cheers Tony...

Welcome to the forum.

Welcome to AWF and thanks for being a paying supporter...

Exapt from Va, eh? Same here, I just ended up in Texas 20 years ago... Taxes are too cheap to go anywhere else now

Think I've got you, DT... my first assembly language was for an IBM 1620 Mod II-D, about 1966 or 1967. My first "big" computer was a DEC KA-10 (PDP-10) running TOPS-10, which was a time-sharing operating system - but it wasn't a virtual system until we upgraded to the KI-10 a couple of years later.

Before I retired, the guys out at work used to call me the "dinosaur herder" because I was a specialist for OpenVMS. I no longer carry a cave-man club and don't wear animal skins, either. But I still grunt a bit when I eat a good steak.

Seems like old time - I recall starting with IBM 1620, then PDP11-05 with macro11, PDP11-45 RSTS-E, and RSX-11D ; IBM 360, 370-155... geez --maybe we're all dinosaurs????

Careful or we'll have NFK coming back & saying I told you so ....

@ The Doc Man - You prolly do (BY at least 10 years), since I came on the scene right as the IBM 370's were coming out. I learned to program BAL on a 16K Univac Machine - two pass card assembler - all overlay work. First commercial apps were CICS Macro Level Assembler, and Online Test Debug- That was DOS VS with Power VS Later, I rewrote a number of COBOL's verbs (Like Inspect and Examine), in Assembler because IBM's way would cause the processors to overheat at the phone company..

(Yes, folks, you zapped real memory and such to create patches- we also set switches on the front of the processor to set dispositions for the program to detect and operate on )

Glad to see there are other of my "kind" here

DistilliTrak said:

... Taxes are too cheap to go anywhere else now

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Guess I’ll have to give the Lone Star Republic some consideration when I quit playing around and decide to grow up then!

Side note: Before I left VA for the European life, I belonged to Home Brew Club in Newport News. We used to gather every Sunday and brew about 10 gallons of whatever struck our fancy (usually a stout) and “get high on our own supply” in the process.

The Brew master used some COTS software to track the process...much what I think yours does. I’ll have to contact him and see which software he is using.

There are times I wish I had stuck around...those Brew Sunday’s was the best way to spend an afternoon, especially during Football season.

ridders said:

Careful or we'll have NFK coming back & saying I told you so ....

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Oh jeez, anything but NFG...um...K! I meant NFK!

NauticalGent said:

The Brew master used some COTS software to track the process...much what I think yours does. I’ll have to contact him and see which software he is using.

There are times I wish I had stuck around...those Brew Sunday’s was the best way to spend an afternoon, especially during Football season.

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Is that beer you are referring to?

Umm, because this is a bit more advanced distillation than that And of course, the federal monthly reporting alone is a cast iron b---- Took me a month to normalize that into a schema, and even then, it's really a transactional problem/.solution set, not so much a relational DB (Althou it is infinitely easier to query that data together than wringing endless excel Macros across linked sheets/tabs -yuuch).

There are a number of freeware packages for beer and ferments, same for wines. The competition I face is a cloud based MySQL solution for 350-400 USD a month, or 6% of a distillers revenues each month (For larger houses) - Thas some change there..

Not so much for harder spirits, and the payloads for them are vastly expensive for in house systems (15k to start). Funny part, is I wrote the original core structures (since deprecated) to track my own distilling under federal AFP guidelines(fuels, solvents, etc). being a born geek, I like all manner of scientific processes, and being able to make distillate seemed like a cool thing to do as a hobby some years ago..Along the way, I learned more than just how to write a new form of programming...