My Moscow Trip
When I took my Moscow trip many years ago, I wasn’t very far down the road before I realised that I would have to build my own application. In 1995 my master log had already been digital for ten years, I had made a number of errors and assumptions when I originally wrote it on an Atari ST. So when it came to moving to a commercial package I had a list of must have’s, but as it turned out no suitable commercial packages actually existed. The best that I could find was Aerodata, but it was a DOS based product back then and it fell short on the must have bit of Moscow and was rejected.
The Self Build Options that I considered.
As I said above there were a number of must haves for me, strangely enough some were must not haves. I had worked in Information Technology for almost 15 years by this point, there were things I did want and things that I didn’t want and these were experience based.
Not Windows or DOS
Early experiences with both Windows and DOS were not good for me, I had considered a number of options, lotus approach was up there but it seemed I would have to go windows. This wasn’t something I wanted to do, I know that both windows and DOS were OK by this point but for me it was a hard no.
What I wanted
When I decided all the things that I did want, I looked at the specification and it was quite a lot more than I actually needed. The standard reporting features, location, date, operator, aircraft history and some not so standard. The ability to print all the reports out, report all the sightings for an individual aircraft. Extensive search functions, batch data entry along with a bunch of things that I might use.
What I decided on – the Must Haves
I decided on a group of things I must have, the ability to get data in and out easily and simple reporting would do for a start. I could add other functions one at a time, as required and more advanced functions could also be added as required. I would collect the obligatory seven data points, which if required could be increase initialy facilitated by a notes data field. The other big one for me was the number of records that the application could hold, which by this point had made the Atari almost impossible to use.
It was what I needed
I built what I needed, there has been an evolution – but not to the extent I expected. Would I do things differently now, probably not. Many of the commercial packages have functionality that my application lacks, my system is different. I added function as I needed it, I can look deeply into my data set and see things not available in the commercial systems. In some respects I was lucky, the decisions that I made were good ones.
Next Post
In the next post, I will look at some of the systems that shouldn’t be any good but are. And how to ask the questions that you sometimes need to ask, even if you are going to upset someone.