So there I was in the summer of 1968, 24 years old, single, good job, two year old car with only four payments left, working in the purchasing department of a medium sized manufacturer and getting a free lunch every day with a sales rep. And then they put up an internal job posting for 'Systems Analyst Trainee'.
On Jan 6, 1969 I moved into my new office. My new boss came in with a stack of books, each one about 3 inches thick in heavy post binders.
The Canadian Income Tax Act.
The Federal Sales Tax Act.
The Ontario Provincial Sales Tax Act
The Quebec Provincial Sales Tax Act
The Accountants Reference Manual.
All I had to do for 6 months was read.
In June I talked to my boss about time shared computers, and in August we bought a Teletype ASR35 and arranged a time sharing contract. The minimum billing was about 70 dollars per month (perspective, my house phone was 8 dollars), and for that we had 4k of memory and concurrent access to 8 relative record files each with 100 records of 256 bytes each.
I wrote my first program.
for i = 1 to 10
print i
next i
Was I now ready for a real application?
To be continued...