I’m a long time MacUser going back to Wednesday December 11th 1991 @ 10:18pm. Yeah, I know the date and time because I saved the very first document I ever created and still have it today. (Just a note, the ‘Pete’ in that little pict refers to my brother Peter who I left the document for as a ‘Read Me Now’ on the desktop)

Later that winter in February of 1992 I had what seemed like a mild blow out crash while ski racing except when I landed on my shoulder this time I couldn’t get it to go back in and the doctors in the hospital later that evening had a struggle to get it back in so I was given the word that this time I needed to have surgery to fix the shoulder and stop the repeated dislocations. Unable to use my right arm as a carpenter that winter and spring I decided I would really set out to learn the computer.

I had bought a construction and remodeling estimating, accounting and scheduling software program for MacUsers called MacNail by Turtle Creek Software. It was a collection of Excel spreadsheets.

I ventured into using MacNail in place of my old pencil and forms based system but I didn’t really like the data in MacNail and not wanting to have to rewrite all of it estimating line items it used I continued on estimating as I had for years now. Plus there was something else I couldn’t easily do in MacNail and that was “free form” estimating from scratch for the theatrical projects we built. I came from the theatre where I designed and built and provided lighting for theatre dance and video production and none of the items I needed to estimate could be found in MacNail, the HomeTech Estimator, or any other construction estimating data sources such as R.S. Means either

Another problem with it was it used a different pricing methodology that the one I wanted to use so I had to make some changes to how it worked so I hacked it to makes changes to it and learned Excel and VBA. Because Turtle Creek Software also had a HyperCard product I also started learning how to program in HyperCard and suddenly I had an interest in this thing called programming

It wasn’t too long before I became a “Power user” with Excel and my own HyperCard creations were pretty neat too.

I don’t recall the name of the program anymore but I bought a Macintosh application for making forms and used it to makes some forms I used in the business at the time. More importantly that program became discontinued and when it did they offered an upgrade to a program called FileMaker Pro 2 and I began to explore using it (and another Macintosh database program I bought, ProVUE’s Panorama). These database programs were great for building lists of stuff. I love lists. Still do. And they were great for searching through the data they contained and sorting and organizing it. Yeah,… I could do that in Excel but not with the speed and ease of a database program.

Then in December of 1995 FileMaker upgraded thier program from FileMaker Pro 2 to FileMaker Pro 3 and introduced what for me was a earthshaking change. The program now worked with a relational database structure. What that meant was when I was working in my file called Estimates I could enter “Client #33” into the  Client field in the program and it would then automatically populate the Client Name, Client Address, Client Phone, etc. fields in the Estimate with information from my Client Contacts file. I could enter the ID# for a particular building Material in my Materials database and it would automatically enter the Material Description, Material Cost, Prefered Material Supplier, Sale Tax for that Material into my Estimate. Likewise I could do the same with Labor. I could enter “Carpenter A” into a field and it would enter what it Cost to have a “Carpenter A” perform that task. And I also then kept a database of Tasks with how much time those Tasks too per Unit and I could look and use that data too. This was all very similar to Excel’s LOOKUP function but a whole lot faster and easier to use and perhaps even more importantly, easier to setup and maintain programatically.

I was off to the races with FileMaker Pro as my horse.

Also in ’05 Windows released their new operating system and since so many of my friends and cohorts were Windows user I kept hearing that if you were really going to get serious with computer programming I had to learn Window and this other MS OS call NT so every chance I got on a Windows computer I poked around explored. But my heart was still in the Apple Macintosh world.