The programming Language by then was QuickBasic and we were writing nicely structured, easy to maintain code. When a bug report came in we would fix it and start mailing out new floppies within 24 hours!
Soon sales were about $1 million, we had 10 employees, and had expanded our product line, although AnonyCAD was still the best seller. Profits were excellent and everybody in the company was working hard. We bought a diskette duplicator, a high speed photo-copier and order professionally designed boxed and manual covers, but they were still loose leafed binders in the then popular IBM small page size format.
Was life perfect? No, as the number of users grew, so did support and training issues. The "early adopters" were tech-savvy people who learned how to use the programs very quickly and often gave us useful suggestions for improved functions and features. But as the user base grew we sold systems to "bosses" who expected their underlings to be able to use the program almost immediately, with little training. The phone rang a long, email not yet having come into use.
We set up a BBS using an old 286 with a fast (19200 bps) modem for support and it caught on pretty quickly. This also allowed us to offer updated versions for download, but although the files were tiny by today's bloated standards, download speed and broken connections were constant issues. Most clients were happy, despite quite a few bugs, because we were quick and responsive to solve problems.
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Software development Then and Now! As an old time software developer, I was very successful in the 1980s and early 90s. After 15 years in other work, I'm starting a new software project. I'll describe the process, the ups and downs, and the success, or lack of success of the project. I'll contrast it with how it was back then.
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- Serial Port
- 60 year old male, self educated in computer programming, marketing, sales and much else. This is my first blog.
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