I cut my programming teeth on VisiCalc for Apple II’s , in the early 80s.
Ahh … the memories in those 40+ years …
First, I wrote a course attendance tracking / course payment application for the adjunct side of the health-care-admin teaching unit of a major university (my professor handed me the VisiCalc software, said “Learn this, and teach it to your class” (which I did)). And later turned this into a job building a floppy-disk sneaker-net internal charge-back app with Lotus 1-2-3 for the OMB of a small city (mid-80s). Which set me on a path doing relational DB work (I didn’t know it was called that at the time, it just seemed … useful to arrange data in categories … which made “lookup” functions in both VisiCalc and Lotus work correctly … especially when using macros to grab data between files (which the software manuals of the day did not describe how to do, and there -was-no-internet- and books … were not there either)). Of course then, I had to make the DataEase DBs export to Excel (alas, MS did not succeed in buying DataEase), and interface with WordStar and maybe WordPad macros … and then I learned how to make nearly everything interface with Oracle (SQL Server didn't have same pizazz for me). And soon, I may retire. We’ll see.
