Thursday, September 19, 2019

Kronos - The beginning

After my stint working as a contractor on the IBM + Raytheon project, a friend of mine I knew from church who happened to know I specialized in Smalltalk reached out to me and got me an interview at Kronos, Inc. where they made time and attendance products.  They hired me as a contractor.

Kronos was the market leader in this space and their breakthrough product was the combination of digital punch clocks with a magnetic card strip reader and an application developed in C to process all the data of employees coming and going.

Before I went there they had created a new version of their system called TimeKeeper C/S which was developed in Smalltalk.  The C/S part stood for Client/Server, so Smalltalk application used a SQL Server database as its backend.

My task on this contracting job was to develop an extension to their TimeKeeper C/S application.  Because they didn't have a database resource to work with me, I developed a dynamic object persistence system that was file based, and I also created a dynamic user interface mechanism to present application windows based on metadata.

It was an interesting project and the work paid well.  Later on the contacts I made would help me again and again.

After the contract period was finished I went back to working on Liberty BASIC again.

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