Little Bits of History of my Programming Journey

1972 – I wrote my first program in PDP-8 assembly language

1973-74 – Diagnostics for a clone of PDP-11 called TDC-16, early device drivers (they were called IOCS – input/output control systems). Early programs were written in Machine Language (coded in octal) since no assembler was available, keyed programs into the console using toggle switches (as binary code) and debugged

1974 – Had paper tape – ASR-35 later high-speed reader and mylar tapes

1974 – Debugged device drivers for magnetic tapes and discs, wrote memory diagnostics that detected noise in core memory (and required shielding)

1975 – My First commercial program in assembly language for Bombay stock exchange for matching buys and sells of stocks. The records were punched in cards and fed to the computer, stored in magnetic tapes and matches performed. The memory configuration was a whopping 16KB.

1976 – Taught, RSX-11M (a real-time operating system in PDP-11) at Tata Electric. Wrote first set of PDP-11 program in RSX-11M an operating system for PDP-11

1978 – Learned  operating systems (RT-11, 11M, IAS, RSTS/E) all PDP-11

1978-79 Built the first soap survey program on RSTS/E in Basic Plus (for IMRB)

1979 – Wrote first commercial applications in Cobol (mostly for training others) and several small Basic-Plus utilties. Worked on performance tuning of RSTS/E operating system.

 Patched RSTS/E corrupted disk writing programs in Basic-Plus

1980-81 Wrote commercial programs in Cobol for consulting at Ashok Leyland

1983 – Developed benchmarks in Cobol for Wipro in Cobol

1984 – First C program (a database schema analyzer in Decus C)

1984 – My first Comdex in Las Vegas

1985 – First relational database metadata design as part of Integra SQL development and wrote small C programs mostly for testing the database

1986 – Integra SQL Version -1 with no nested selects, designed and built entirely by reading C.J.Date’s book on Relational Database Systems

1986 – Licensed Integra SQL to SCO (Santa Cruz Operations)

1987 – 1990: C-Trieve (an ISAM file management system), Objectrieve – C-Trieve extended to support Blobs, Licensing of C-Trieve to the White Water Group (they called it WinTrieve)

1991 – Objectrieve/VB was born and exhibited at Comdex May 1991

1992 – DbControls a set of custom controls for building database applications

1993 – Integra VDB – The first relational database set of components. Got covered in the BYTE magazine

1994-1996 – Layered SQL on top of dBase, Paradox, Btrieve (the last one was a project for Varian systems). Most of the coding was writing small examples in C, VB.

1996-2008 Coding winter

2009-Now – Dabbling in Python, little bits of ML, Chatbots