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Retrospective

By Henry J. de Jong

I got my start in computers a long time ago (1971) in grade 11 'Computer Science.'   Back then we drew flow charts and hand printed Fortran programs onto ruled sheets that were sent to the one city (Sarnia) high school that had a mainframe computer. There they were typed onto cards and put in the hopper, once. A couple of days later we got back the results and the cards and, more often than not, we had to try again.

I was destined (they said to me in high school) to go into engineering or computer science at Waterloo University. I went to U of T instead, but I did take one computer course (in C something -or -other).  Things weren't much different then (1974), except that I had to type my own cards and I could hole up in the computer room till all hours feeding the machine until the results were right. But the next year the Arts drew me away from the Sciences and I parted ways for a while with the computer.

Towards the end of my music and philosophy studies, when I dreamed of going into music publishing, I saw the computer as an essential part of the business of adapting/arranging music and getting it out quickly to customers. During 1983 and 1984 I spent weeks writing a music notation/storage program in Pascal. I still have a ream of neatly penciled subroutines that have never seen the inside of a computer. But this program was conceived the same year as our eldest child and, though we did buy our first PC (AT&T 6300, 10 MB XT) just before Michael was born in '84, the demands of supporting a family won out over grand ideas. Before I could even think of getting back to it, music programs could be bought off the shelf.

Our new PC proved useful anyway. My wife Wendy and I mastered Word Perfect 4.0 between the two of us so she could run a word processing business from our home.  I learned DOS 2.11 and set up my renovating business accounting in dBaseIII. Now, with work to do and a computer to do it with I got a taste for the satisfaction of meeting real, practical challenges. I'm still proud of the (now completely useless) parallel printer definitions that I concocted for our daisy wheel printer to print all the characters of one font during one pass of a (sometimes large) document and then all the characters of another font during a second pass.

A little while later I wrote a cataloguing program for a weekly newspaper, where I worked for a few years, and a program to maintain and report on our church's membership records. But then my learning curve went flat again while the responsibilities of caring for a second child, serving in a new church, and doing renovations increased. Still, the computer remained as useful to me as any tool in my shop. Wendy's use of the computer for her secretarial work continued unabated and our children (three of them by now) have never known life without the old PC. (It's still available for use during peak hours--if they'll have it).

In January, 1997 this relaxed state of affairs was shattered by the purchase of a Pentium. Our new computer has 150 times the memory of the old one and it seems my brain is expected to follow suit. During these last years I've clicked my way into the darkest corners of Windows95, I've browsed to the outer corners of the World Wide Web and I've faxed and e-mailed my way to many other desktops. I loaded up the enormous Lotus Suite and set up Lotus 123 worksheets to do my invoicing, expenses and time logs before throwing the whole works out in favour of Access 97. We upgraded to WordPerfect 8 and then working together again to figure out the new Windows of opportunity, especially in graphics, for Wendy's work.  O yes, before I even had the new computer in hand I bought a music program just for fun.

The rest of the story is documented in this site's Resources: Software section.   At this stage, after so much  learning, I remain persuaded that I don't know very much. A look at the bookshelves of Chapters, or a WWW search result numbering in the millions is certainly cause for despair. But enough will always be enough to do a job well, and if I need more -- well, it's enough to know how to learn.

During the last 32 years my relationship with computers has been mostly casual even as they were making serious inroads into the world around me. But I've been impressed lately by the accessibility and the potential of PC applications in the home and in the workplace, and especially, I think, by their emerging visual sophistication. I'd like to turn my attention fully to the development ofi nternet, database and other information applications. I think that the same self-motivation, commitment to customer satisfaction and attention to detail that has marked my business for the last 18 years, coupled with a natural aptitude for logical and creative thinking will be of some use in the field of information services too.