Jim’s Development Blog

I developed a job cost accounting package back in 1981 through 1983. It was written in Basic for a multi-user operating system called Oasis (now Theos), and it originally ran on a Radio Shack TRS80 Model II. If I remember correctly, the nucleus of the operating system was loaded into the lowest 16KB (not MB!) of RAM, and then each user had his or her own 8KB of memory partition to hold the software and data. Attach a dumb terminal or two to the serial ports of the computer, and you had a two or three user system. It worked. It worked surprisingly well. The Basic language had built-in statements to access keyed and indexed data files, which meant that you could write a record to a file like this:

Write #1, Key$: ID$, Name$, Address$, GrossPay

Compared to the primitive features in GW-Basic, this was almost magical. It took care of record contention issues, although the earliest version of the OS used sector locking instead of true record locking. It was very solid, very reliable, and it was a cheap way for my clients to get into computers.

The software that I wrote was originally developed for the construction industry, but over the years it was adapted for many other industries. Job costing can be applied in many situations. The software worked; if you looked at the code, you might wonder how. I wrote it without having any solid background in software development, so the resulting code wasn’t pretty. Some spaghetti, a lot of obscure variable names…

All of these years later, I still have three companies which continue to rely on that old code. Oasis long ago changed its name to Theos, but the software continues to plug along. For many reasons, I would prefer that the remaining three companies move on to another product, but until they do, I continue to provide support.

One of these clients has decided to offer their employees a 401(k) plan. I now need to reacquaint myself with this 25 year old source code and add the wage deferral option to their payroll system.