I was a programmer back in the MS-DOS and early Windows days. My language of choice was Turbo Pascal. Source control consisted of daily backups to ZIP files on

I was a programmer back in the MS-DOS and early Windows days. My language of choice was Turbo Pascal. Source control consisted of daily backups to ZIP files on floppy disks. The program I wrote talked to hand-held computers running a proprietary OS that I programmed in PL/N their in house variant. The communications ran through a weird custom card that talked SDLC (I think). I was the whole tech staff, work-life balance was reasonable, as everything was done turning normal day-shift hours. There was quite a bit of driving, as ComEd's power plants are scattered across the Northern half of Illinois. I averaged 35,000 miles/year. It was one of the most rewarding times of my life, work wise. The program was essentially a set of CRUD applications, and I wrote a set of libraries that made it easy to build editors, much in the manner of the then popular DBASE II pc database. Just call with X,Y,Data, and you had a field editor. I did various reports and for the most part it was pretty easy. The only odd bit was that I needed to do multi-tasking and some text pipelining, so I wrote a cooperative multi-tasker for Turbo Pascal to enable that. There weren't any grand design principles. I was taught a ton about User Friendliness by Russ Reynolds, the Operations Manager of Will County Generating Station. He'd bring in a person off the floor, explain that he understood this wasn't their job, and that any problems they had were my fault, and give them a set of things to do with the computer. I quickly learned that you should always have ** PRESS F1 FOR HELP ** on the screen, for example. Russ taught me a ton about having empathy for the users that I carried throughout my career.