What was the first piece of commercial software you wrote and what did it do?
This was a good question I was asked by a student interviewing me about my entry into being a software engineer, so I thought I'd share the answer.
It was a PC auditing software application, written in Turbo Pascal for DOS, it scanned your files identified a bunch of known executable and produced a finger print of your machine (linked to either the network Mac address or the BIOS serial number) it showed a number on the screen and I had a silver (label) punch to put that number into a hard metal sticker and put that onto the PC case.
This was used by Claremont Garments* (by me actually) to audit most all the machines they had, it was related to a commercial product we'd bought to do a similar task, but after a bit of tinkering I found my own solution did the task better, and I could export the data to a spreadsheet to produce reports more easily and cheaply than paying for the custom import tools.
I used this software throughout the UK, I sent it to a bunch of folks working with me from the London office and then North East office and finally it went with me for my sojourn in Morocco to audit everything.
I was actually waxing lyrical just today about in order execution of the 486, that first piece of software of mine was definitely operating "in order".
To this day I have fond memories of programming in Pascal for DOS. And though this was not the first major piece of software I'd written, it was the first used for a commercial purpose and by someone other than me.
* Interesting link to the past, the Claremont site at which I worked was the Selston Factory, which is the town in which I now live... I have fond memories of that job, and I think a fair few people around here remember that factory. It lives on under "Lilley Close" which is built on the site, but there is a commemoration of the factory in its original "Wood Bastow" incarnation.... That maybe another post I put together, to share with you all.
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