I started working with computers in the late ‘60s doing hardware design. I built computers by designing the circuit boards using clock chips, XOR gates and AND gates etc.! I hired out the silkscreen creation, but otherwise did all the other work. After completing my BA requirements at UCSD, I taught Basic programming as a TA for three years.
As soon as C made its first alpha appearance, the company I was with (Commodore Business Machines—think C64 and Amiga) offered me the chance to learn and alpha-test their version. I never looked back to Basic until I got to MS Windows.
I was one of those folks who disparaged Microsoft for being too big so I stayed with CBM until they disappeared then switched to Be: the BeBox and BeOS (a Mac/Linux hybrid) until the went the way of all good things!
In the mid-‘80s I had the most popular CBM C64 program of the year with my version of “Monopoly™”. In the early ‘90s I had the #3 most popular CBM Amiga program of the year with “Spheres of Influence”. In the late ‘90s I released BeGUI for the BeBox to critical acclaim; it is a programmer’s tool which allows any program written using it (as a wrapper around the system gadget classes) to be complete locale, font and color sensitive in a multi-user environment. At the time (and probably to this day) there is nothing even close with respect to transparent user-defined program customization.
About 1995 I was forced to adopt MS Windows because I became heavily involved with lifestyle adaptability for severely disabled friends and family members. Windows was the only playfield for environmental control. At the time the only programming I was doing was using the macro languages built into a few very specialized programs. I am a volunteer member of the Microsoft Adaptability Team—Redmonds WA is about an hour away, but I only go there a few times a year.
That gets us up to today! I recently downloaded the free Visual Studio 2008 (I will get the Pro version for free the next time I go up to Microsoft.) I needed to work my brain as it is getting flabby! I looked at non-Visual C++ from a few of the major vendors and realized that I was so out of date (Namespace was a talked about concept when I last programmed) that I decided to look at Visual Basic. It is about the same as C++ as I last used C++.
Ed Musgrove