I took up databases starting off by teaching myself DBase which was very frustrating. Moved on to MS Access which was not bad and had or has a lot of potential for small business operations. Then I studied what I use now and that is SQL Server and FileMaker Pro which are really nice. I'm now creating stand alone programs with FileMaker Pro.
At first my early computers had 5 1/4" floppy disk drives. That gave way to 3 1/2" drives that had much more capacity like 720K for a 5 1/4" to 1.5Mb for the 3 1/2" drives. There was talk of 2 and 3Mb 3 1/2" inch drives but I never saw one. Then a new disk drive hit the market, the CD drive. It was rumored that you could write on the disk with a magic marker and the disk could still be read. We all know how false that rumor turned out. And the capacity was over 650Mb per disk.
I really wanted one of those but the original CD drives required a SCSI interface plus they ran over $1,000 each. Today I can buy one for under $20 and it does not require any special interfaces.
Even memory took a large jump. My first Windows computers had 8Mb of RAM. Then there was a price break on memory, I was able to buy 128Mb of RAM for only $210. Originally that much ran around $400, so yes it was a deal at at time. Now you get get gigabytes for well under a hundred.
I remember buying my first real big hard drive. It was a whopping 1.2Gb of storage. Talk about excitement. I'd never fill that puppy up. Right. Now I'm looking at solid state hard drives in the terabyte range.
Things have really changed since that little Timex Sinclair.
Today I have several servers running Windows server, numerous laptops, desktops, even a few computers running LINUX in my house. For data storage I have a 64TB NAS, to get on-line we have a 100Mbps fiber optic connection with a SonicWall firewall and the switches are all Cisco. And with all of that hardware, comes a big electric bill from one of the most expensive electric companies in the US. Freaky thing is that I have more computing power sitting in my home office than my former company.
In high school I learned a little programming in languages you do not see very much anymore. Today I know JAVA and VB.Net but not enough to call myself a programmer or developer which is the new term. I went on with my formal computer education and earned my degree in computers, took additional courses covering MSCE and CCNA from another college, studied various on-line MOOCS covering Filemaker Pro, InDesign, Illustrator, and more.
I taught myself to write webpages in HTML at first using WordPerfect then onto Dreamweaver and using CSS. For graphics I first used PaintShop Pro but later moved into using Photoshop and became quite proficient with it and now do custom graphics for a social media website. Some of the graphics are photo manipulations. I have also gotten involved in creating some Infographics as well.
If you visit my Art Gallery from here or the tab on top, you can see some of my work.
At my last job I wrote my own trouble ticket system in MS Access that has features that you cannot find with commercial systems. I tried to make it stand-alone, that is not requiring Access to be installed using the MS Jet Engine but had all kinds of trouble making it work. Eventually I re-wrote the entire program in FileMaker Pro that has the same functionality as my original but with more features. Using FileMaker Pro I was able to compile the program so it is totally stand-alone and can run on any machine that does not have FileMaker Pro installed.
At times I sit back looking at my home network and think that things were a lot simpler with the little Timex Sinclair. But I wouldn't want to go back. |