Creating a Requisition
Last modified: September 5, 1996
This was my first major Macintosh application. I was very excited about bringing the power of the mainframe down to the desktop. But I had a few things to learn.
Data corruption on the mainframe is almost unheard of. You can say a lot of negative things about legacy systems, but data integrity is an absolute given. Part of the reason for this is that we have a whole crew of people who support our legacy systems behind the scenes. If a disk pack crashes, I know system programmers (:-}) who will stay up all night putting the bits and bytes back together. Our database administrators will make sure our databases are backed up and reorganized on a regular basis. And mainframe application programmers have it easy. The worst we need worry about is an occasional oc7.
Ahhhh, the good ol' days! I discovered on this first Macintosh project that a microcomputer developer must wear all hats. We are System's Programmer, DBA and application programmer! I spent a year researching all the ways a local database could be corrupted and all the ways my clients could avoid that corruption. Although, I spent a few sleepless nights that year, the outcome was successful. MITCAM has been in use now throughout MIT for over 6 years. No one, to my knowledge, has lost any data. Staff enter non-personnel (purchase orders, travel expense forms, petty cash, etc) & personnel commitments (new hires, salary information, labor distribution, vacations, etc) and manage their accounts through custom reports designed and programmed by John Miller ( johnm@mitvmc.mit.edu).
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