🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <rohnsv4r710fpmsl25b2p7vjqrop56b6sp@4ax.com>, 
steverush@att.net wrote:
>On 01 Dec 2003 22:10:42 GMT, Charles Kincaid <kincaic@swbell.net>
>wrote:
>>gswork@mailcity.com (gswork) wrote in
>>news:81f33a98.0311270225.1c513af4@posting.google.com: 
>><snip> 
>>>> One place that I worked produced software for dental practice
>>>> management.  It did everything. Not just billing. Appointments,
>>>> recall mailings, electronic insurance filing, treatment planning,
>>>> image management (X-rays and recent patient photographs). You get
>>>> into medical records and we are not talking games here.  All written
>>>> in BASIC.  VB in the latter days and BASCOM in the old DOS days.  
>>> 
>>> When were those projects started, out of interest.  If new projects of
>>> a similar requirement were being started now would they be done in
>>> BASIC and what implmentation?
>>
>>It is true that the dental stuff was started in 1983 on Radio Shack 
>>computers running LDOS.  We did a complete rewrite to move to DOS on the 
>>PC. Ground up rewrite for Windos.

There was a business in the tourist ghetto of Cairns that sold Tandy 
stuff.  By the end of the TRS-80 they had half the other businesses in 
Cairns running on these machines and a large (by our standards :) 
training facility.  Lots of places using the Model II with twin 8" 
drives IIRC.

I seem to recall the boss saying after the IBM PCs appeared that the 
big omission from BASIC on the IBM and clones was Ctrl O to sort 
records.  Apparently, a lot of the software they wrote for the local 
businesses used this feature of TRS Basic in inventory/sales programs.

>>If I had it to do over I would still do it in BASIC. Probably PowerBasic.  
>>I would use MySQL for the database rather than "rolling our own" the way 
>>we did it back then.  Either that or PHP if we were going web based.
>
> I wonder how many current readers of this NG know how much we used to
>get out of those 8-bit systems, especially under LDOS, which had
>self-installing device drivers and (limited) multitasking before IBM
>was ready to admit that there could be such an animal as a _personal_
>computer.

Cheers, Phred.

-- 
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