No, not an (allegedly) revolutionary self help book, just an old computer manual. I’ll keep the technical bit brief… If you are old enough to remember before the IBM PC (that was 1981 by the way) we used to use dumb terminals – no graphics, just green or white text on a black background – what more could you want?
Quite a lot as it turns out. Sometime in the early ‘90s I must have been at a loose end. Seeing this manual lying around I decided to have a flip through it (as you do). In it I found a way to write a program to read the text on the screen of a dumb terminal. I also knew that I could link this program up so that when the user pressed a certain magic key on their keyboard, my little program would be called and it would read their screen.
Sounds pretty exciting eh? As a young keen programmer it was. The reason is that we had been doing a bit with document management involving some scanning. It occurred to me that if the user was in their Line of Business application and say, they went into a customer account, they could press the magic key on the keyboard, my program would read what was on the screen and it could work out which of their customers it was. Then my program could list all the associated images. Pretty cool I thought.
I wrote the program and gave a demo to some colleagues. To my surprise, instead of suggesting that I ‘get out more’ they seemed impressed and saw the potential, though they might still have felt that I should get out more,
Thus ImageView was born with its (at the time) unique feature. Times have changed and so has ImageView, now sporting a modern web interface.
Did this manual change my life? Well it didn’t change my values or core beliefs, but it certainly changed the direction of my life, and that of some of my colleagues.
Perhaps you have a similar story? Perhaps you are glad you didn’t get out more but instead invented something that changed, at least the direction of your life and others too. Drop us a line, we’d love to hear about it.
Mark Wheadon, Director. July 2022
#PacSolUK #IBM #IBMi #ImageView