I started programming, if that's what you can call it, on a Radio Shack Color Computer (CoCo) in 1982. I spent most of the first 3 months doing nothing but poring over books on basic and assembly language programming. The first actual program I tried writing was a VHS movie library to keep track of which movies were on which tapes and at what counter position they started. Saving and loading data to a cassette tape was the normal medium of the day since most disk drives were large and expensive. Then, IBM introduced their personal PC with 5¼ inch floppy disk. As soon as I could get an interface and a floppy drive, I added disk storage to my CoCo. Now I was really cooking with gas! Of course, as the XT morphed into the AT, and the 286 turned into the 386 and so on, I knew there was more to programming than my little CoCo could handle.

I worked in electronics since graduating high school in 1975, and specifically in repairing office equipment from around 1981 until 1988. I decided then that I would rather program on computers than repair them. I enrolled in Computer Science at Lamer University in Beaumont, Texas. By the time that I graduated in 1992, I knew that I could sit in front of a computer almost 24 hours a day without even thinking about it. As a matter of fact, my wife threatened several times to have a keyboard tattooed on her stomach just so I would pay attention to her.

While working as network administrator for several law firms, I had opportunities to build small programs to handle minor situations in an office environment. For instance, one of the first programs I wrote was a small system tray icon that popped up to list all office extensions and office related information of each employee. It wasn't a big deal at the time but it sure made some secretaries lives a little easier. It also saved on printing new extensions sheets every time someone moved around or were released/hired. Update the file on the network and everyone had the right numbers immediately.

I have programmed in various languages (Cobol, C, C++, Pascal, Lisp, Fortran, etc.) but gave them all up when I started using Delphi 2. It was the first visual environment I had used up until then. I now use Delphi 5. Yeah, I know I'm behind the times by not upgrading to D7, or at least D6, but I like it so much and am so comfortable with it, I just can't bring myself to update it. J