I’m a Mac User – I’ve done it
I’ve done it. After almost 18 years, I’ve switched from a PC to my new iMac OS X. I still can’t believe it. Over the years, I’ve always monitored Apple and how they went from a proprietary hardware system to the Intel platform with the new OS X.
As a professional, I’m running my .Net development on the iMac using VMWare under a Windows XP window. Works great. The main reason to actually go out and invest into an iMac was iPhone development for the new iPhone 3G using the COCOA Touch framework and XCode.
This is really exciting and I strongly believe that the iPhone from a development point of view has a huge potential. I’ve some personal projects I’m working on for the iPhone at the moment. When the first app is released in the AppStore, I will announce it here. I’ve not felt this excited since the late 80’s when I started writing my first shareware program ACZAR.
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About
Hi,
I’m a software architect and obsessive software designer seeking to create high quality software for people to enjoy and be productive with.
I’ve started to play around with computers back in the mid 80’s using the Schneider Amstrad CPC 464 computer based on the Z80 chip and a whopping 4 Mhz. I tried my hands on the Locomotive Basic which was built into the computer and available in about 2 seconds after you turned on the computer. 
I did the things like play games and typing in pages of code to learn more about computers. Seeing the “Hello World” flashing by was pretty cool back then. I even developed my first serious application on the CPC 464 which was for managing printer codes for dot-matrix printers. The games on the CPC had better graphics than the Commodore C64 but suffered a not so good sound.
I moved on to my first PC back in 1989 after using all my savings of $3,800 to buy my first 80386 DX (notice the DX) with a stunning 256 color VGA graphics card and the first edition of a SoundBlaster (AdLib was slowing going out of business). I bought it through the famous Computer Shopper back then. It only came with a simple DOS 3.2 prompt. Nothing else. All I knew was how to turn on a PC. Coming from Europe to the US, I was still used to the home computer feel and not so much of PC fan. That changed when I saw the first games coming out for the PC in 256 color modes. I knew back then that I wanted to do this for a living and went to College.
I started programming in GW-BASIC and developed several small programs. I quickly outgrew GW-BASIC and moved to the much more powerful QuickBasic 3.0 and 4.5 and then later to Microsoft BASIC PDS 7.1. In addition, I had to learn Borland Turbo Pascal 5.5, Turbo C, Assembler, Cobol, etc.
I always liked BASIC PDS 7.1 because it allowed to create applications in fully compiled code that were as fast as compiled Turbo C and Turbo Pascal. Microsoft came out with Visual Basic for DOS 1.0 and could not wait for it to come out back in 1990. It allowed creating applications quickly but with the power of compiled machine code. One of my applications was called ACZAR which stood for Archive Shell and was a shell for pretty much all compression utilities out there including PKZIP (ZIP), ARC, LZH, PAK, ZOO, ARJ, etc. There were two other programs called Arcmaster and SHEZ but they had horrible user interfaces and I thought that I could do much better. Therefore, ACZAR for DOS v1.0 was born. You can still find it out there in the Internet as ACZAR version 2.10 for DOS. I had also created a Windows 3 version in Visual Basic 3.0 and a Windows 95 version of ACZAR in Delphi 2.
Interestingly, I created ACZAR for DOS 2.10 in Visual Basic for DOS v1. Yes, there was a Visual Basic for DOS before Visual Basic for Windows 1.0 was released. I even created 3 custom components for Visual Basic for DOS to allow the use of Extended Memory as well as Expanded Memory for string space. This overcame the 640 KByte limit of a normal DOS application.
After completing College in Computer Science, I went on to a company called Real Estate Software Company (no longer in business today). I originally started out as a junior programmer for a summer job but ended up working for Real Estate Software for about 7 years and gained a lot of business knowledge in the Real Estate Industry as well as running a small software company. Our software managed over 1 million rental properties. The software was originally created with IBM BASIC 1.0 and then later transformed with QuickBasic 4.0 over the years until I had introduced BASIC PDS 7.10 to the company which allowed as to take advantage of the libraries that shipped with it such as the ISAM (Indexed Sequential Access Method) database which was the grandfather of the Access Database Engine and later on the access engine for Visual Basic 2.0 for Windows.
I was in charge of converting our huge DOS based application to the new Windows 3.0 World using Visual Basic for Windows v3.0 and then later on v4.0.
Over the years at Real Estate Software company, I outgrew Visual Basic and maximized calling the Windows API’s way too much. So, I started looking for a more efficient way of doing things. Visual C++ came to mind and I played with it for a while but I never felt comfortable enough to say that this is an efficient way of developing business applications. Then I found Delphi 1 when it was released in 1995. That made my day. I was so excited when I heard that Borland released Delphi for Windows. Finally, I was able to create Windows DLL’s without any third party libraries. I was finally able to create Windows applications with the ease of Visual Basic for Windows and the power of C++ all in one package: Object Pascal for Windows in a product called Delphi. Delphi allowed me to create self-running EXE’s. Visual Basic required the run-time libraries (apx. 10 MB) which was no small problem back then because space was limited.
With Delphi 1 in 1995, I started my real life object oriented software development adventures. Delphi was fully object oriented and it shipped with over 200 components out of the box including the source code for them.
I left Real Estate Software Company in 1997 and started consulting work for various clients with Maxim Group using Visual Basic, Delphi, etc. until I founded my own company CZAR Software Inc. in 1998. Because I had learned so much in the Real Estate industry, I wanted to create my own Property Management Software using Delphi as my primary tool. It all went well and I even sold it to almost 200 companies until the summer of 2000 when the Internet bubble busted. All sales went flat and I was forced to shut-down the company. I started consulting work again until 2001 when I took on a full time position at Royal Caribbean Cruises as Senior Developer/Architect. I stayed with Royal Caribbean Cruises until October 2006. It was in Summer of 2000 and then later officially at Royal Caribbean Cruises when I started Enterprise Software Development using Microsoft .Net 1.0 and then later on v1.1 and 2.0.
I have create many other applications commercially and in-house custom solutions to numerous to go into detail here. I may come back to my blog and update this once in a while.
Today, I’m concentrating on efficient software development processes and my love for Object Oriented software development. I love the process of converting requirements into domain models using .Net and other tools. I find myself more and more teaching others about software development in general and powers of object orientation done right no matter how large the projects are. In addition, I’m amazed to find that not many people realize that there is the engineering part of software development; but, just as important, there is the creative part of it that can not be forced to come out under brute force or old style thinking of “putting the hours in”.
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For a highschool student what laptop would you suggest?
Thank You
I would recommend an Apple MacBook. It has everything a student needs and is reliable. http://www.apple.com/macbook/