Hi everybody. I'm happy to be a part of this forum and since intros are in order, this one is me!
I started high school in 1961, the same year that President Kennedy said we would have a man on the moon before the end of the decade! That was also only 2 years after the engineers publically stated that the transistors were reliable enough to replace the vacuum tubes in computers. I started college as a math major and after two year decided to drop out to get some training in computers from the group who, in 1971, knew most about them, the US Army!
My first programming jobs with the military were accomplished with a keyboard in one hand and a soldering iron in the other. You couldn't buy an interface board for a new piece of hardware in the early 70's, you had to design and build it yourself.
My first job after the military was with a typesetting company. We designed and wrote our own word processor, typesetting system, in the late 70's. Our first WYSIWYG / Windows application was marketed in 1982. Microsoft didn't release their version of Windows until 1983. Our system was only usable for typesetting, Microsoft's was much more versatile!
Our system was capable of breaking the manuscript of a text book into pages, adding footnotes to the bottom of each page, while placing referenced illustrations and tables near their actual references. We had one feature that no-one else at the time had, the ability to typeset mathematical and chemical formulas. Because of this feature, at its high point, more than 80% of the college textbooks in the US were typeset on our system.
I don't want to take any of the credit away from "Al", but the college professors who were writing those books usually provided their manuscripts to the publishers with our "markup language" imbedded. The similarities between the HTML language and our language are, in my opinion, no accident. We called the ability of a table element to appear over multiple columns of rows, "straddle heads". The HTML languages calls the same ability "rowspan" and "colspan". The effect by whichever name you choose is identical. Sorry Al !
I'm working on more, but will have to get the OK from the admin if I ever announce them on this forum.
I've been a Visual Studio 6 developer for many years, primarily in C and C++. I'm just getting started in Visual Studio 2008 and C#.
I hope to make many contributions to the site as well as learn some new tricks!