In the early 90s, when I embarked on my professional programming career, I dedicated considerable time to developing various reporting solutions for a bespoke Construction Support System. This system was utilized by our engineers and technicians during the construction and assembly of trains and trams.

The platform operated on a VAX/VMS system, with an INGRES database at its core to store the intricate hierarchical representations of each train. My contributions encompassed crafting custom printer driver code tailored to extract various information from this system and producing various reports.

I programmed the solutions using FORTRAN, supplemented with hand-written PostScript code. To this day, the reference books from that era hold a place on my bookshelf.

Here's an example of some hand-written PostScript used by one of the reports:

Good memories.

Amiga Demo Scene History

This month (May 2023) marks the 36th anniversary since we released the first Amiga Demo-Creator in May 1987. At that time, we had no idea it would be used by quite a few groups to kick-start their Amiga demo-game, including the legendary Fairlight.

Looking back now, it feels like an eternity ago and almost unreal that we created something, shipped on floppy-disks to our Amiga Demo-Scene friends, and only finding out decades later that it was actually used by groups at the time.

The Supremacy Demo Creator was released back in May 1987, back when we were still in the early days of the Amiga Demo Scene. Our solution allowed Amiga users to create demos/intros by supplying:

image
sampled sound
scrolling text (displayed w/built-in "hand-coded" font)

We had just finished our first Amiga demo, when we set out to build an Amiga Demo Creator. The Assembly coding was done over a period of about 2 weeks. I also coded the font "by hand" inside the application using the Assembler editor. There was no commonly available Internet for us back then, so distribution was often done on floppies via regular post mail.

Side note:
"The Supremacy" group name was chosen because I had just read "The Bourne Supremacy" (Robert Ludlum, 1986).