The "Good Old Days?" Well, not so much, really.

[MineralMan]

171. Yeah, self-taught, which is why I stuck to variations of BASIC.

Despite all of its limitations, I extended it to do a lot of things it wasn't supposed to be able to do.

At one point, I designed an event-oriented user interface for MS-DOS, complete with drop-down menus, full use of the two-button mouse, and a bunch of other things that let me do what I wanted to do with the software I was developing. In MS-DOS, I adopted the QuickBasic compiler from it's first version. Another company offered extensions that let me access a lot of additional tools, as well.

As soon as Microsoft offered Visual Basic, I switched to creating applications and utilities for Windows. I began to work with large arrays to manage variables that had lots of parameters. Since my datasets were relatively small, I could store all of those arrays in memory. You could simply write those arrays to files and reload them. Pretty much nobody was doing that, so I shared that concept online, mainly on CompuServe, since the Internet wasn't fully active yet. I wanted an animated splash screen for my company's programs, so I figured out how to do animations, using some interesting trickery in Visual Basic. I shared those techniques by making a public domain animation module and sharing the source code.

Basically, I was having fun, really. But, I did a few applications that were useful, like a business card design program that printed business cards on the pre-perforated card stock that was available. The program had an editing screen and a preview screen, since I couldn't do WYSIWYG in VB. The program's interface had menus, but most of the functions that were available also had on-screen drop-down lists for things like font selection, graphics, line-drawing, etc. It was a busy interface, but easy to learn. The name of the software was Rockford.

I converted that to a related program for designing labels, either for printing multiple labels on one page or address labels from a built-in database in the program. That database was also array-based, so it was as fast as lightning. It was limited to 750 records, but you could save the data in as many files as you liked, so it was unlimited. That program was MultiLabel.

Windows didn't have a decent way to preview uninstalled TrueType fonts, so I Created Fonter, which let you preview fonts you downloaded from somewhere and print font samples. It also tested the fonts for errors that could crash Windows. There were some really badly done fonts out there. Then, you could use Fonter to install the fonts in Windows permanently, or temporarily for that session of Windows. A related program, which was free, just tested fonts before you installed them. Microsoft had that program available on its own website for people wanting such a thing.

I also had some smaller utility programs I created because I wanted them for myself. Those I just put out there as freeware, in the public domain.

I made some money with some of that software, but not a lot. Maybe $10-15K a year. OsoSoft, my little company, was around for about 10 years, but I finally shut it down and made all of the software public domain. It was all just a fun exercise for me, really.