Back
in 1985, I worked for Steinberg GmbH
(a German music software company) setting up their North American office
in Northridge, California. It was basically just me and one other guy,
and my job duties included (among many other things) creating a database
system to track our customers, dealers, products, registrations, orders,
purchase orders, inventory and updates. Back then, we were working on
Macintosh Plus computers and had heard of a hip little database application
called FileMaker. Although it
didn't do much, it had a great graphic user interface (GUI) and could
"look up" information from other files. I thought it was so
cool that I could build a system that, when you entered a product code
into a line item of an order, the other information about that product
(description, price, quantity in stock) would "magically" appear
beside it.
Over
the years, FileMaker Pro had become more and more powerful and by 1990,
I began using it to organize my MIDI
consulting business. I had left Steinberg, and was working full-time as
an independent contractor. Without FileMaker,
it would have been very difficult to keep on top of everything. When my
wife had our first child and began selling Discovery
Toys, I decided to write for her a database system that would track
her customers, and automatically tally up her orders after a "toy
party" and build a master order. Her recruiter was so impressed when
she saw it work, she convinced me to make it available to other DT'ers.
That's when I found out about the Claris Solutions Alliance (now the FileMaker
Solutions Alliance). Pretty soon, I had an actual software program
which I built, wrote the manual for, marketed, sold, shipped, and supported...
all by myself! I was very proud -- and very overworked.
