The purpose of this article is to share some of my limited experience with the PC with you. Maybe you are thinking of buying a computer or purchasing a software package for your business. Believe me you can purchase a system today with a lot less money than ever before. There seems to never be an ideal time to buy, because tomorrow you can buy the same system cheaper, larger, and faster than today. You just have to jump in there at some point and be satisfied with your decision. As for software you either have to have a lot more spare time or be a lot smarter than myself to even consider programming your own software. You can purchase complete software packages for your business now very reasonably priced. However I don't think I have ever found anything more rewarding, in the physical realm, than making one of these strange critters dance. If you have the time, come on in and let me take you on a quick journey from yesteryear to cyberspace.
In 1987 I purchased my first computer, a Tandy 286 with a 20 meg hard drive and 640k ram. I was on cloud 9 my problems were solved, until I got home and hooked everything up and came up to a C:/ prompt. I quickly learned that I didn't know anything about what I had purchased. After staring at the black screen with that strange C:/ and reading the documentation that came with the Tandy for a few days I proceded to try to find someone locally that could help. As Andy Taylor, told Aunt Bee when Gomer Pyle was working on the freezer that he new absolutely nothing about. "Call the man." "JUST CALL THE MAN!!!!"
I called the man at PC Computer Solutions in Butler, Georgia, Gene McDonald who later became a good friend of mine and helped me tremendiously. He asked me what type of software I had installed in my computer. I did what every intellectual person does that owns a high tech machine like a computer, I answered him with a question. What is software? After discussing my problem with Gene and telling him about my initial reason for buying the computer he began to study different resource magazines for a database program to install in my Tandy. After Gene figured out what I was trying to do and I saved a few more green stamps he ordered a programmable database program called Paradox 2.0 developed by The Borland Company. Naturally the first thing Gene had to do was upgrade the ram in the Tandy to run Paradox efficiently. After that I was on my own again but now I had a tool that was capable of the task at hand.
The task I had in mind was organizing our hardware stores bulk items (items that could not be priced with a sticker) in a fashion in a printed catalog that could be upgraded periodically from a pricing diskette furnished by our distributor. A simple task so I thought. After much reading and studing the Paradox manuals and a lot of trial and error work, I was able to accomplish this with interactive Paradox, which is building tables and printing reports through the Paradox menu system. This is great, I can now take a pricing diskette with prices of about 40,000 sku's which was in a format called a fixed ASCII file and extract the 10,000 items that we stock and update my counter catalog. The one problem that I found in printing this counter catalog was finding a way to code my actual cost using ten letters to substitute for the numerical cost.
This was the beginning of what I found out later was a thirst that would never be completly quenched. This called for me to write a script of code in PAL (paradox application language). Which was completely Greek to me. After studing and reading the PAL manual that came with Paradox, I was throughly confused. It seemed the more I studied the worse it got. However I did not give up. I needed to work this out before I could use the counter catalog. I purchased several books on programming in PAL and read and studied some more. The best help that I found was The Cobb Groups, Paradox Developers Journal a monthly subscription that breaks PAL down where even Gomer and I can digest it. Finally I stumbled across a script of code that a guy had written to translat a numerical amount entered on a check to the english longhand version. I studied this code and after learning how to debug code and step though the code one line at a time I was able to work out this problem. The counter catalog was now useable and something that once took months to manually update prices could be done in a few hours.
My adventure continues, after reaching the catalog goal, I thought of all kind of chores for this new tool. Our bookkeeper and most faithful employee, Patsy Beeland, was hand writing between 300 and 400 monthly statements. I started with building a customer database of about 1200 customers with names and addresses to print out mailing labels. This was accomplished again with the interactive Paradox menus. This alone turned out to be quite a time saver. I then figured out that a report could be made in Paradox to match the handwritten statements, all that was needed was the data from Patsy's accounts receivables. For several months, Patsy would call out the data and I would would enter it in a Paradox form and then print the report to produce statements. See, Patsy was a die hard, old school, bookkeeper that had a great set of manual books and she didn't want anyone messing with her setup. She would not dream of touching or having anything to do with that beastly computer. In between time I was still digging and trying to learn PAL. I soon realized that I needed some foundational background in programming if I was to get anything accomplished.
When you work like I do between the hardware store, general contracting business, and the cow calf operation on our farm, it does not leave a lot of time for a formal education. I turned to the McGraw-Hill Continuing Education Center so I could study in my spare time (ha) at home. They started off with flowcharting to teach a graphic representation of how a program should work. Next I studied GW-BASIC and wrote a small program that acted as a simple cash register. Then debug/assembler or sometimes called machine language which every computer language is ultimately converted to, before the computer processes it. Pascal which had a lot of similarities to PAL, the C-language was next which also had some similarities to PAL and COBOL which was the original business computer language. After about 18 months of this course and receiving my diploma I went back to work with PAL.
When I started the programming course I didn't realize how much difference the foundational background work would mean working in PAL but it really made the code flow. In a few months after starting back in PAL I was actually starting to accomplish my goal of a workable accounts receivable. By this time Patsy had actually grown attached to the efficiency of running statements with the computer. But she still would not let herself get to involved with entering data. Patsy would take the daily charge tickets and hand write the customers name and data into a sales summary and from there into a accounts recieveable book. This would be the next step to automation, the sales summary program. I designed a Paradox form that would pull names up from the customer database by account number and from there I could enter the invoice information. When Patsy saw a neatly printed out report she could use for the sales summary that had the totals of all columns arranged at the bottom she now was impressed enough with not having to hand write the sales summary, to give entering data via the keyboard a try. And boy did she take off on this task, I've never been able to enter data this fast. Patsy now opens her menu driven accounts receivable program through a password protected dialog box, then to her own menu bar which has the Sales Summary tools, Report tools, Customer add, delete, change or view buttons, Accounts Receivables tools, and last but certainly not least the Monthly Statement buttons.
All this time I have upgraded my Parodox software as it was made available first 3.0 then the next year I upgraded to Paradox 4.0. This version had a feature I would put to use in my next project which would be to make the information in the accounts receivable program available at a terminal on our sales counter. Dynarray creates a flexible structured dynamic array that I used in the code to store a list of customers so a choice could be made from a few instead of 1200. By entering one or more letters of the customers last name, the more letters typed, the smaller the array would be, so the array has to be able to change sizes on the fly. Once the customer has been selected it then pulls up aged account information 1-30 days, 31-60 days, 61-90 days and over 91 days and the total due along with any payments received this month. This is also a credit approval system. Then and only then, if the customer is in the first two columns and within his line of credit the computer will then print the customers name and address on a invoice then to be manually filled out with merchandise. I realize that this is a far cry from a complete point of sale system but it is a big improvement over the 1200 card roledex file system that we used to hand imprint names and addresses on invoices before implementing the computer. Before I could actually put this program to work, I had to install a small 2-user peer to peer network. I chose Lantastic network software for this job. It works great, is easily mantained and was not beyond my abilities to install. This program has been installed and operating since March 1993.
This brings us to Microsoft's plan for the new operating system. I had been so busy with the DOS versions of Paradox, I had almost missed what is possibly the best graphical user interface ever massed produced, Windows. Borland stopped developing a Dos version of Paradox with 4.0, so this brought on a new delimea for me, to stop programming in Dos Paradox and switch to Paradox for Windows or change to a completely different language. After carefully studying several options I chose to change to another language, also developed by Borland a new Windows development tool, Delphi.
I quickly found out when a company like Borland says powerful, it means very complicated or at least it is to a simple minded person like myself. I found out later that our main hardware distributor had decided to have their paper catalog converted to a CD-ROM catalog. This happened to be written in Delphi. Was this just coincedence? I don't think so, see my Lord was still watching over me despite of my hard headedness and sometimes my neglect to acknowledge his presence in my life. See, it is true, that nothing passes to us unless first passing through his hands.
My distributor, had been making special arrangements for me to receive a ASCII file, that had all the prices to update my counter catalog, now these prices were coming to me quartely on the CD. I called my distributor to ask if I could open the CD pricelist and update my catalog I was told that this was not possible. After many months of studing and a lot of HIS help, I was able to write a Delphi program to accomplish this task.
This brings us to the year 1997 when I took my first trip into cyberspace. Well I've been here several months now and I'm still falling off the surf board. But, its getting better. The more I see of this web, the more I want to see. Its very much like a sticky spider web, once your caught, its hard to turn loose. Thanks for dropping by.
If you have comments or suggestions, email me at jkh@gnat.net
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