Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

macOS What was your first programming job?

I was doing some programming for my job with a civil engineer. In 1991 a local firm was trying to use Microsoft Quick BASIC to get data out of a big data set. Interpreted BASIC was so slow that their fastest Mac would have to run full-time for three months to get the job done and by that time they would get a data reload. Also the data was unsorted so they would have to use the same horrible development environment to write a sorter. They asked me to write the same program in C to see if it would be faster. I wrote it with Think C and used every optimization I could. It ran in 1% of the time. I had a job. They paid me crap because it was a start-up and the deal was when they got going they would pay me what I was worth. They never did, I quit and went consultant and charged three times as much, including to them. Lessons learned:

Don't use a crappy language or IDE. Don't work for crappy wages. Don't treat your employees like crap especially in a tech company.
 
My Junior year of college (1972). Wrote a PL/I program to automate curriculum reports for students. The program was a pretty straight-forward data retrieval and reporting tool. The data entry and encoding of a dozen 100 page volumes of curricula data was 90% of the project. Fortunately I did not have to do the data entry, only the coding.

The database used IBM's IMS, a hierachical database manager.

Got paid $200 for the job. Given that gas was $0.25/gallon back then, I was able to fill up for the rest of academic year with what I earned, including several trips home to visit the parents.
 
Punch card programming in FORTRAN for an engineering firm doing stress analysis on preformed concrete bridge components. This was in the 1970s.

Pay was outstanding for the day, as there were very few engineers available with software skills.

The simulations were thousands of cards in several boxes that ran on an IBM mainframe and produced reams of paper that needed even more analysis when it finished running!

Problems with only one card aborted the run...
 
Macman45 said:
Started out on a Data General Tape driven system...I can't quite remember the response time of the thing, but it was measured in hours. From there, a Dec PDP 11 running mumps (no, not a joke a coding language) From there some nifty Texas Instruments mainframes with disk drives the size of washing machines.

My how times have changed...:)
Click to expand...

MUMPS is still in use today...
 
First Job was in 1983 on an Apple II. I used BASIC to interpret user input template dimensions and produce a punch tape output for CNC machines. Moved onto Turbo Pascal and Quick Basic and boring production control databases.

Stopped programming for a job 22 years ago; I am tempted to start messing around with Xcode just to see if I still got what it takes - in all probability the answer will be no!

Only got my first Mac 3 years ago, but lusted after one for many years! it's funny how buying them now seems to be a hobby :)
 
I guess my first paid programming job was in the summer of 1996, I was a summer student at a local defense contracting company. Though it didn't actually occur to me at the time that that's what they were. Not that they were particularly clandestine, but they weren't obvious about it and the department that hired me specialized in "signal and information processing" which could have been anything. Though I guess the pictures of tanks everywhere should have been a giveaway...

I did some minor Java work (it was still an up-and-coming new language at the time and they wanted me to check it out) and some HTML work for their internal websites, which was also pretty cutting-edge at the time.

Oh, and the pay: $8/hour. :p
 
Howdy,

I don't know if this qualifies as a "job", but the first time I was paid for my programming was in 2005 when I started my own business of creating plugins for a 3D animation software, and selling them online. The pay is up and down (dependent on sales), so there is no fixed rate of income. But, to be honest, I wouldn't give it up for the world. ;)

Adios,
Cactus Dan
 
1967 on an NCR/Elliot 4120. Scientific analysis programmes in Algol60 for Chemical Engineering applications : Physical Property predictions, simulations of Distillation Columns etc.
1968/69 Univac 1108 and DEC PDP10. Same sort of stuff but applied to entire Chemical plants using Flow Sheet programming in Fortran.
 
Last edited:
Back in 2004, got paid $50/hr for a large database conversion project for a local historical society's geneology records. Their in-place system was a Paradox database, with 25,000+ records and no functionality. I wrote a pretty spiffy MS Access 2003 program that fixed and streamlined their data, provided powerful searching functions, and displayed family lineage. I was pretty happy with it, and obviously they were too, as the whole job took me about 40 hours, and they indeed paid me about $2000 for it.

I've written in Pascal, C, BASIC, and most recently Objective C. Getting serious about iOS app development, which I can post about when someone asks the question, "What was your most lucrative programming job?" ;)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back