About Me
I didn't set out with some grand plan to become a software developer. I wanted to...
- be President, and
- compete in the Olympics, AND
- become the first female professional quarterback.
All at the same time, of course.
Once reality set in, I went to school for accounting, but I discovered I was much more interested in how the work got done than in simply doing the work.
I wanted to know where the information came from. Where it went next. Why somebody had to type it again. Why a report took three hours to prepare. Why five people kept five different versions of the same spreadsheet?!?!
I wrote my first computer program on a typewriter.
My first real job was bookkeeping for a daycare center. At the risk of aging myself, I entered information into a journal by hand. BORING!
I got really excited when we finally bought a new Olivetti electronic typewriter with two disk drives and a tiny little screen that I could preview what I typed before printing it. I figured out a way to setup our weekly billing utilizing the 2 disk drives and the built-in operating system Olivetti used at the time.
Then a computer burned down my family’s house.
Yes. Literally.
According to the fire inspector, lightning struck the power line, arced to the computer monitor sitting on my mom’s desk—and blew it up.
The resulting fire destroyed our home. Or in the infamous words of my brother, to my parents,
"the house is toast".
You might think that would have ended my fascination with computers.
It did not.
I went to work for the family business, where many of the systems still ran on paper.
Inventory. Forms. Logs. Reports. Information lived in filing cabinets instead of where people actually needed it.
As my family started rebuilding their home, I started rebuilding those processes on a computer.
A different one.
This was before Windows became the standard business environment. I was working in DOS and DataEase, building database systems that replaced manual processes and made information easier to enter, find, report on and reuse.
Please Insert Disk 18.
There was a time when the internet came on a disk. In the mail.
And Microsoft Office came on about 30 of them.
FREE Tech tips for real people
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TIP: for iPhone users: Did you know that if you make a typo and don't spot it until you've nearly finished your message, you don't have to backspace all the way back to the error. Just hold your spacebar down and drag the pointer to the spot of the error and fix it.
