Moving Up

A few months into my new job at C.F.C. I wrote an application for Tina in accounting. She had the only computer in the building that had a hard drive. It was an Epson Equity which is an IBM XT clone with a monochrome green screen and a 20MB hard drive running MS-DOS 2.11. I'm guessing a heard Tina and Simone (who is Bob's wife and VP of the company) talking about a need, and I must have offered to craft a solution for them. Simone probably asked me with surprise, "Can you do that?" I was eager to jump right in. I'm pretty sure that GW-BASIC was already installed on the computer. :-)

Up to this point my programming work for engineering and accounting was done on my own initiative. I wasn't trying to attract attention, but Bob noticed my enthusiasm for software development. He is an open minded person, and his whole business was personal and informal so he must have found it easy to promote me out of engineering. I became the company's in-house computer programmer. That was quick! I didn't get a pay raise but how could I complain? This was exactly what I wanted and it was an opportunity for him too.

This is the sort of business that just begs to be automated. Bob certainly knew this. One programmer could keep himself busy with interesting work for many years and I was the lucky fellow.