Re: What do you do in real life?

[roughana <andrew.roughan@writeme.com>]

> > I bet many of us have landed in interesting positions in technology.
>
> > Eight bit computing is a nice escape from modern computing.  So I ask
> > readers of c.s.apple2 -- what do you do in the real  life?  What do you
> > do for a living?

I started by asking for an Atari 2600 games machine. My parents
instead bought an Apple ][ europlus for Christmas 1982. I learnt BASIC
and started trying to 'collect' as many programs as as I could. I went
to school with a guy whose parents lived in Hong Kong and after one
holiday he came back with CIA.
We had a lab of Apple IIs at school and lunchtimes were spent running
programs and checking stuff out.
We were all looking at CIA and the teacher running the classroom asked
us if we could work out how to copy Milliken Word Processor.
It became a race between us who could work out how to do it first. In
the end I worked out the sector headers were different and manually
used the Copy ][+ sector editor to read in each sector and wrote it
out on another disk with normal headers. A quick patch to the OS and
it was done. The others didn't manage it.
I worked out some automated ways to do it better in later years :)
I did a comp sci uni degree and my Apple II experience meant that my
first year was basically a breeze.
Third year was a year of industry experience and I worked at a IBM sub
contractor applying internationalisation patches to some mainframe
productivity suite. By the end of that job we were getting our daily
work done in about an hour after working out how to program the
keyboards with macros to automate the process of applying and testing
the patches.
After graduating, I started work in consulting software company and
became proficient in Powerhouse 4GL working on Human Resources and
Payroll accounts for corporations around Australia.
That consulting company became the source for some local 'talent' for
implementing a business banking software package sold by a Belgian
company. I became an expert in their Java Internet Banking offering
and subsequently was the development team leader for the client side
of the first internet banking solution for a particular major bank
here. I stepped sideways into corporate banking implementations and
became the local technical analyst.
Later I decided that trying to keep up with the technology was a never
ending struggle and I hopped the fence into the business analysis side
of things. I'm still there.
We're currently implementing a system for banks to handle Single
European Payment Area (SEPA) Direct Debit files and interface with the
STEP2 clearing system.

Along the way I've done a lot of Apple II stuff as a hobby.
http://home.datacodsl.com/kalandi/apple/index.htm

Regards,
Andrew