I am a bit of a “Technology Enthuiast” a.k.a “geek” or “nerd”. I have had the interest ever since I got my first computer back in the early 1980’s(‘81or ’82). It was the good old Commodore Vic20!! How many of you are old enough to remember that classic?

I moved on from there with an upgrade to the Commodore 64 in late 1983. That computer served me well throughout high school and my B.Sc. I spent a lot of time programming it and typing in programs from Compute’s Gazette! I still used it some during the M.Sc. and Ph.D., but more for recreation rather than serious work.

I used my supervisor’s Mac (an Apple IIIe or something along that line if I recall correctly) for my M.Sc. thesis. That was my first serious use of Apple products.

During my Ph.D. I was still using Mac for a bit in the lab, but then I purchased my first Intel Pentium 90 machine with Windows 3.1 in 1996. This was also around the time when the internet was just taking off and I got online and started with GeoCities as my first website host. I got a book on HTML and was making my websites by editing the HTML code directly in Notepad! I even touched on a little bit of JavaScript and wrote a simple “Guess the number” game on my website. I still had the code for that game, and have since updated it using the current version of JavaScript and HTML. You can give it a try here once I add it to the site.

Hindsight being what it is, I could have easily done my degree in Computer Science rather than Chemistry, but it was science that I was interested in at the time. During my Ph.D. I became more and more interested in all things computer related. So my job at Advanced Chemistry Development (ACD/Labs) was aptly suited as I could be working with computers and software but still make use of my Chemistry degree without having to be stuck behind a lab bench all day.

During my tenure at ACD/Labs (Nov. 1999 – June 2010), I got back into doing some computer programming. I had not really done any since taking FORTRAN in some first and second year computer courses during my B.Sc plus the BASIC programming on the Commodore 64. All programming beyond this point was all through self directed learning.  No formal training.

I was writing some programs with the ACD/ChemBasic scripting language. It is really an object oriented scripting language and is similar to VisualBasic and not the procedural BASIC of yore that I was familiar with. I essentially learned it from scratch and using the guide, help files and previously written ChemBasic “Goodies” as examples. I got very good at it and wrote a whole bunch of utility scripts and little programs for manipulating data tables and chemical structures within the various software modules.  I became the “Go To” person for questions about what could be accomplished with ChemBasic .

At the same time, I also got into programming for the PalmOS platform using NSBasic/Palm as the development tool. I was using a Sony Clie as my Palm device and then also a Palm Treo 600 smartphone. This was in the heyday of the PalmOS devices so it was fun to get into. Again I wrote a few simple programs such as a number guessing game and Hangman. That only lasted a couple of years until PalmOS was phased out.

And then Apple came out with the iPhone. I got the iPhone 3G when it became available in Canada. I was also considering a Blackberry Bold model at the same time and went with the iPhone and never looked back.  Have subsequently upgraded to iPhone 4, iPhone 6, iPhone 7, iPhone 8 and as of this writing, iPhone 12 as my current smartphone.

I have not got into programming for the iPhone. I had a few false starts with the intention of getting into it, but quickly lost interest or did not have the time. Part of the issue was the tools used to program for it. Xcode seemed very daunting to get into and Objective-C was a whole different world to me. I had a book on Objective-C 2.0 and never really got into it. Nowadays there are other programming environments for building iPhone Apps which may make creating apps easier, but I just need to come up with an idea for an app that I would want to try out.

On the desktop side of things, I switched over to Apple as my main platform in 2008 when I bought an iMac. I would only use Windows in a virtual machine by either VMware Fusion or Parallels for a few programs that I needed where there was no comparable Mac version.  I did buy another PC machine in 2012, but it was more for being able to test things out and troubleshoot issues as part of my job while being a member of Nerds On Site (Dec. 2011 – Dec. 2018).

I have dabbled a few times with various flavours of Linux such as RedHat, Fedora and Ubuntu.  I have set up older PC computers just to get a feel for it. Haven’t stayed with it for any length of time to do anything productive with it. More of just a curiosity.

For desktop programming I have used a variety of different development environments. I have used ones that are similar to BASIC or Visual Basic.  After using NSBasic/Palm, that company also came out with NSBasic/Desktop.  I tried this out for a while as well.  It was based around VBScript for creating desktop executables.

After I switched over to the Mac, I came across RealBasic from RealSoftware.  Again it was a BASIC programming language, but for the Mac instead of having to learn Xcode. RealBasic expanded into multiplatform support for Windows and Linux as well with the same code base.  A few years ago RealBasic became Xojo. I had full licenses for a couple of years, but let them lapse.  I used it to write a few utilities at ACD/Labs that integrated with ChemBasic. I still am using the free version of Xojo and may upgrade again soon.

I have recently played around with Python. I got a couple of introductory books on it and have even written a little program to pick LottoMax and Lotto 649 numbers.

At this point, I am slowly trying to get back into doing some programming in one form or another. The on going pandemic and lockdowns have given me time to think about programming and to try to get excited by it again.  Stay tuned!