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I wrote a Student Information system for my midterm project back in 94 written in Clipper and runs on MS-DOS.

I demoed & explained to the panel of professors how it tracks enrollments, payments, class schedules, grades and attendance of each and every student. Has user authentication, auditing and reporting functionalities.
It has a lite version also written in Clipper that can be installed on a Professor's laptop so that he/she can update records even at home, and would be able to sync with the db at school via a BBS. Telix for DOS (self-taught) was my choice for the BBS as it was shareware, has built-in Zmodem support and comes with it's own programming language called SALT (Script Application Language for Telix) that can be used for automating tasks. The lite version of my project would dump the updates on an ASCII file, compress the file using PKZIP, use the laptop's modem to dial-up the number to the school's BBS and send the file across using Zmodem protocol.
The main version would then download the file(s) from the BBS and proceed to do a sync.

After the doing the demo and answering all their questions the panel asked me to wait outside the room, called me back in after 15mins and told me that I don't have to attend that class for the remainder of the term. The happiness as the my classmates outside of the room gawked at me felt like King Midas himself gave my balls his golden touch.

Then in 97, 2yrs after I graduated, I accompanied my cousins to a different campus of the same school for their enrollment and right there on the bottom of the screen were my initials on a very very familiar UI! They actually used, and were still using, my school project. Needless to say my cousins didn't believe that it was written by me.

Comments
  • 10
    nice one! 😀
  • 7
    Nice one!!
  • 5
    Nice one!!!
  • 23
    I understood the first, third and fourth paragraphs.
  • 3
    You, sir, gained our respect!
  • 5
  • 2
    Wow beautiful.
  • 4
    80% of this post no longer existed before i was even born
  • 5
    So they said you didn't have to attend the class anymore so they could steal your work for free?
  • 6
    @jirehstudios sucks if you put it that way but School owns the projects anyway
  • 2
    Mad respects, sir.
  • 4
  • 3
    And here I am, struggling to make my personal project in django, which has everything already built-in in a "plug and play" manner. Respect.

    Btw, when I saw "... 97, 2 years after..", I actually read "97.2 years later". First I was confused calculating your age, then I was even more confused calculating the year you where supposed to be in the future (2094 I think) and then realised that was a comma. Funny how dots and commas make a big difference, huh?
  • 7
    @gitcommit thanks man. The first time I started working on a global application I also got confused by figures like 1.000,00 and then I learned that some countries use comma as decimal separator and dots or space for digit grouping
  • 3
    I still have the compiler in a whopping 1.44MB 3.5inch High Density disk 😎
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