Long page alert!
It was in the seventies
at age 16 when I first got into contact with a computer. I built the Nascom-1,
a
computer you had to assemble yourself. It
had a 2 kilobyte ROM and 1 KB RAM, of which about 768 bytes were
available to store your program and data. My little TV
was the monitor and a 40-key keyboard was the input. No storage, mouses
didn't exist yet! Writing assembly by hand, translating it into
mnemonics by using a book and entering the program in hex 
. Those
were
the days!
Studying
to become a teacher
A few months into the
second year of my study to becoming a math and science teacher, I got
in touch with more serious computer equipment and it did not took long
before I was spending more time behind the PDP11 terminal than
following college. It became apparent that becoming a teacher was not
my thing, and after a few months I transferred to a more technical
study. This did not work out (amongst others same problem: spending all
my time behind a terminal) and I started working as a data typist for
a chemical company in 1977. Now I could sit behind a terminal the
whole day and make some money too.
My first job as a data typist
There I learned the art of programming
COBOL after I talked a technician of Burroughs(nostalgic pictures!) into giving me the COBOL
compiler *grins* already in those days copying software was not
uncommon. With no manual, no example programs, no book (and the WWW
did not exist yet!) I managed to get my first few letters on
the console screen (*smiling* 8 lines of 32 characters) by correcting
my program based on the compiler errors. Luckily my employer saw the
advantages of me becoming a programmer, so he payed for a COBOL course
and I started to improve the standard software that was used for the
administration.
After about 2 years (I was still mainly the data
typist) I had rewritten all the software and added the automatic
transfer of delivery orders to the transshipment plant over a 1200 baud
datacom line. Before that they were hand-typed telex messages! Now the
plant could report back the actual amount and that was fed into the
invoicing, very sophisticated for those days.
Programmer
The
same technician that got me the compiler also brought me in
contact with my next employer. A small softwarehouse, developing COBOL
software for Burroughs machines and selling them too. After a period of
working for both
companies, I worked there full time. In those 15 years I
developed administrative systems, salary systems and foreign
currency
systems. This is also the time that the first 4GL
programming languages appeared, the PC came
into the world and I wrote my own programming language :-) There is a
lot more to say about this period of my career, let me just mention the
Tandem non-stop Unix system that played a role again many years later.
Demonstrating non-stop
technology
Beautiful machines to demonstrate your software on. Imagine the look on
the face of the customer when you demonstrated the software and in the
mean time pulling out processor, memory and I/O boards from the
machine. It just kept on running! Even pulling disks
didn't stopped it. Of course I knew what I could and could not
pull ;-) Being a
small system integrator, it was a big success that we were able to sell
two of
those machines to two world famous banks in Holland. And, not many
people know, they were both programmed in my programming language! (I
can now say this, since both banks don't use the software anymore. The
last bank quit using it in ..... 2008).
Consultant
Alas the founder and
owner of the company did not agree with me that we needed to migrate
our software from the character oriented terminals we used into the
graphical world of Windows and OS/2. During that time I invested a lot
of private time into learning more about the modern operating systems
and it became apparent to me that character based programming was going
to become niche. It came to a separation and I applied for a job
at (Logica)CMG, a
consultancy firm where I learned what consultancy really was. I was so
proud getting my first consultancy assignment, being a tester of the
first version of the Dutch Tax program for private persons. Numerous
bugs were found by me and corrected by the developers in a small team,
I couldn't have wished for a better start.
It was in 1995 that I
first got in contact with JAVA,
at that time a new programming language available
in beta from Sun. I downloaded it and started to play with it. Made my
first applet, saw the big advantage(again, RISL had this too) of write
once run anywhere and
invested a lot of time into it. I did numerous consultancy jobs based
on my JAVA knowledge and it was member of the JAVA special interest
group within CMG.
Founder
There it was were I first met my later business
partner. We started a firm together doing JAVA consultancy. We were
very lucky that our first customer had a big international project and
the two of us could work close together for a long time. The base
of our firm was there! We went to JavaONE, the
yearly conference in San
Francisco and after a few years a third partner joined. And
another few
years a fourth partner joined. Because of different
vision
of the future of the company, I left to go solo.
Solo
Again a lucky start, I
could continue my contract for the client of that time and got a solid
base too. Except for a severe motor cycle accident which made me stay
at home for five months, things went smoothly and are still going
smoothly today
RISL
I promised to tell some more about my programming language and the role
it played again in recent years. At the end of 2007, the one bank still
using the software asked for my support in maintaining their software
for another few months after the supplier (and my previous employer)
went bankrupt after the dead of the founder and the lack of new
customers. I had been giving the bank my support in the years before
that via that previous employer, so it was no surprise that they asked
me. I acquired the Tandem Puma S4000 from my previous employer and
could do both software and hardware maintenance for the bank. Since the
maintenance was only for a few months (it eventually lasted for half a
year), I can now offer the non-stop machine for sale 
As a programming language, or maybe I should say IDE, RISL
was very complete (hey, I wrote it myself!) and included a screen
painter, report painter, (syntax driven) source editor, database
repository, debugger, run-time interpreter and various utilities
written in the language itself. I called it Reduced Instruction Set
Language, RISL(WOW! it is mentioned on all-acronyms.com.
Did I do that?!) for short. At that time I had a version for CTOS, Tandem
Non-stop Unix, SCO Unix, OS/2 and Ms-dos.
Porting a RISL application from one operating system to another was a
simple recompile. I even made a RISL to C translator. Improved the
executing speed five-fold! The only known customer still using it
today (end of 2008) is my sister for an administration system of the
caravan(travel trailer) winter storage she and her husband are
running.
RISL contains some very sophisticated statements, the one I am most
proud of was made specific for the banking application. After entering
a sales contract (which could consist of 10 currencies and 12
banknotes) , the typist had to wait up to 45 seconds before the
contract was processed. I created a statement that forked the
processing into a background process and the typist could enter the
next contract within seconds. The background process communicated with
the foreground process, informing it by its progress which was shown to
the user by a green or red contract number. Red in case of an error, by
pressing a dedicated function key the user could toggle between the
foreground and the (up to five) background processes.
The language and IDE were character based, the single reason I didn't
continue with its development after the graphics based languages (for
example JAVA) became popular. The sources are still on my PC though,
and compiling the over 384,000 lines of C code and linking the
executable takes less than a minute nowadays.....