Took BASIC in high school and used it on a co-op assignment during college. I was at a company called New Venture Gear that manufactured 4 wheel drive systems

Took BASIC in high school and used it on a co-op assignment during college. I was at a company called New Venture Gear that manufactured 4 wheel drive systems for Chrysler and GM. I was given the task of generating graphs of test data for an electronically variable transfer case. I had to use Lotus 123 for this and initially wrote a BASIC program to format the data so it could be imported into 123. Then I wrote these macros to generate 80 line charts, each displaying 8 different variables. Each line had its own color but it wasn't easy to follow the behavior of the system. Then it occurred to me that I could graphically display the data using BASIC. I created an overhead image of the vehicle with four wheels, an engine and a drive shaft to the front end. Whenever a rear wheel lost traction, I flashed that wheel. When power was sent to the front end, the front driveshaft lit up. The engine speed was represented with a bar graph. The overall effect was great. You could see the vehicle turn, the engine rev, a wheel start to slip and power going to the front end. And then the rear wheel would stop slipping. You could vary the speed and even run it backwards. And it ran in a loop. When I showed it my bosses, they didn't seem to get it at first, but soon they were having me demo it to GM. And they took it to the test track with them, allowing them to instantly review a test instead of waiting weeks for a graph. One thing I did not account for was the steering direction. I had data for the steering rack, not the wheels. The rack moves to the left when the wheels are turned to the right. So the replay of each test was turning in the wrong direction! This also helped me get my first job after college. I devoted the second page of my resume to an "example of innovation" and told this story.