The year was 1976 and I was in this really dead-end job in Port Moresby. Normally, I'd rather be dead than be seen in a dead-end job, and I wouldn't have given it more than a month or two but personal circumstances had forced me to stick it out.
To make me feel I was actually getting somewhere, I enrolled in a programming course at the nearby University of Papua New Guinea, which is how FORTRAN IV became my pathway to computing.
Personal computers weren't around yet, and computing was still a closed shop with men in white coats doing mysterious things behind closed doors. It wasn't until 1980 that I could try out my new knowledge with Morgan Equipment in my old stamping ground on Bougainville Island.
Morgan Equipment's computer was the size of a large fridge and ran on software written in COBOL (more than sixty years later - it was first used in 1959 - the COBOL programming language is still alive today)
The large white disk I'm holding is a 5MB removable harddisk - imagine, A WHOLE FIVE MEGABYTES! WOW! We thought it would last us for ever!
After Morgan Equipment, I learned the PICK language for Ranger Uranium but never used it much until I met Debbie - click here.
With my appetite sufficiently whetted, I started my own computer consultancy, Canberra Computer Accounting Systems, and offered the lot: hardware, software (bespoke and off-the-shelf), and networking (that was before WINDOWS, and networks were either LANTASTIC or NOVELL).
Personal computers had just come on the market, and they weren't the sort of thing that you just plugged in and pressed the button. Countless hours were needed to "burn them in"; to perform low-level formatting during which one set the interleaf and partitioned the harddisk, followed by high-level formatting during which one transferred the system files that contained the hardware configurations; and finally one wrote the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files to fire up the computer.
Then came the biggest part of the job: drawing up a chart of accounts tailored to the particular business one was doing it for, which required accounting knowledge; then, using these accounts, each of the various modules - Accounts Payables, Accounts Receivables, Inventory, Invoicing, Job Costing, Payroll, etc. - was linked to the General Ledger module from which the then also tailor-made financial reports - Trading and Profit & Loss Statement, Balance Sheet, etc. - could be generated.
For several years I had the market almost completely to myself, until the big accounting firms realised that there was money to be made in computer consultancies, and began to set up their own PC departments.
And then came WINDOWS and cheap accounting software like MYOB! Suddenly we were all computer experts and ready-made accountants, and Peter Goerman, Dip.Ac., FAAI, AFAIM, MIMCA, of Canberra Computer Accounting Systems, Canberra's only accounting software specialists, went into retirement on the beautiful South Coast of New South Wales!
It was fun while it lasted. Thanks for the memories!
