[riiskit]

Greetings all,

...it's been some time since playing with code, er should I say oop case tools of 15 years ago. Prior to that....lol...yep, was punchin' cards to feed the machine

So, without any training I decided I would design and build an inventory bill-of-materials system(with hooks into Btrieve and AutoCad) for our manufacturing company. At the time I was the production manager looking after 7 manufacturing departments and fed-up with the S36 and its dynamic limitations.

Those were the days...magical....loved it.

Allllllrighty then....good journeys all ~riiskit

[OliveOyl3471]

riiskit, on 29 May, 2009 - 12:42 AM, said:

So, without any training I decided I would design and build an inventory bill-of-materials system

How long did it take? And how did it turn out?

I like your moxie. Just jump right in there and do it, right?

Welcome to DIC, btw.

[riiskit]

okee doke oliveoyl...here it goes,

I searched the globe for a BoM(Bill of Materials) system that could be configured on-the-fly and found none, IBM's MetaShop was the closest but sadly they had just realized a need for the on-the-fly configurable BoM and were years from a beta. So this news halted my quest.

I love a good challenge, if you can dream it...you can do it.

I worked part-time in the evenings and weekends, oh and of course while I slept. I taught myself programming methods and concepts as I needed them...basically hacked my way till the end. It took about 8 months to have a fully functional inventory system(GUI running on DOS 3.3) with reporting and forecasting. While viewing an item in the inv system you could press a button and pull-up the AutoCAD dwg for that part, with panning, zooming, and annotations...then escape back to the inv system(Myriad was used for the call to an AutoCAD dwg). The inv database was primitively relational. The BoM was another 6 mos or so, and also featured hooks into AutoCAD. No two finished products were the same, out of 2700 parts per finished product at least 1100 differed which included top-level assemblies. So an on-the-fly configurable BoM was required for purchasing/forecasting. The system was completely proprietary and was not designed to be used by others, if it was to be marketed I'm sure I would still be working on it 15 years later lol.

Twas fun for sure!

[OliveOyl3471]

Why didn't I notice this before? Sorry...I guess I missed your reply earlier.

Quote

I taught myself programming methods and concepts as I needed them...basically hacked my way till the end.

That's very cool. How did you do this...I mean, did you use C, or what?

[riiskit]

I used a little known OOP CASE tool called Layout 2.1 from Objects Inc. which allowed porting to many languages common in those days. I often ran into inadequacies within Layout to perform complex procedures, I would then spend the time to plug-in external snippets. I guess I would compare Layout 2 & 3 along side todays IDE's but with much less flexibility. I now have 2 versions of Eclipse and several of Smalltalk, have not decided on a platform as yet... sooooo many to choose from, I think I'm drowning.

Tks for your interest OliveOyl, brought back a ton of good memories.

good journeys to you
Brent

[OliveOyl3471]

You're quite welcome, Brent.

I like talking about programming, even if I don't understand it all yet. One of these days, though, my programming skills will be up to par and I will be able to help out more in the forums. Right now though I guess I'm just better at talking about programming.



btw, I had a good friend named Brent once.