FoxPro Ramblings

My name is Michial Thompson, I've been programming since about 1978 or so. I began programming like most back then using the Basic Language for the TRS-80 Model 1 Level 1 that my school had in the library.

The school only had 2 games for that Computer, one was Hangman, and the other was Blackjack. Hangman was boring, and there were only 100 words or so that existed in Hanman, and once you knew what they were it got boring.

Now Blackjack is another story, I learned to play poker around age 5 or so, and by age 7 I was playing Blackjack with the best of them. So by age 10, I was learning to count cards, and so the computer at school worked right into the equation.

Quickly I learned that the computer was cheating, it was re-shuffling the cards with every hand, totally unfair if your goal is to learn to count cards. Well needless to say it was going to take a little effort if this was ever going to be a tool for me.

So I started reading every book I could find about using the TRS-80, I learned how to break out of a program, and quickly learned that this game was written in a Language called Basic. So off to the public library I went to learn something new. Several programming books later I've learned about variables, and arrays, and all this stuff that had nothing to do with Blackjack.

I think that the only thing that kept me interested in programming at the time is that I had this unquenchable thirst for Math, and was at the time learning about Algebra. Most of the initial programming books I found were about Fortran, and Fortran was about Math....

Anyway after a few weeks, and lots of reading later I had finally found some books on Basic, and was starting to figure out how this Blackjack game was actually written. The very first thing I did was increase the starting money from $1000 to $1 Million. This was great because I never run out of money betting $1 to $5 at a time. But quickly the $5 cap wasn't good enough so off to finding that limit and upping it.

All the time it was bugging me that the computer was shuffling after every hand... So time to fix that... That was I learned that it was a bit more of a challenge than just changing a "w=1000" to "w=1000000", or an "if b>5 then"

A few months later I finally figured it all out and had a Blackjack game that shuffled after the Array of cards was below 15 cards, and that had bets from $1 to $1 million. GREAT now I can finally practice counting cards....

I then learned that rnd() was not really RANDOM.... I started noticing the cards were falling in the same order every time I sat down to the computer...

So the story goes on and on and finally I'm actually proficient in programming in Basic. I eventually go on to learn Z-80 Assembler, 8088 Assembler, c and a host of other languages including this fairly unknown language eventually referred to as xBase.

In the fallow few years I write a number of BBS (bulletin Board Systems) for modems ranging from 110bps to 9600bps.

I write a couple of small BBS games (remember my experience with Blackjack? Bet you will never guess what the first game I wrote for a BBS was.)

I'm eventually approached by a lawyer Friend of mine from the BBS's to write a program (for money even) to assist him in managing his cases. This was around age 13 or 14. And that's how my career got started.

... jumping 23 years into the future now:

So now its 2006 (almost 2007), and here I am writing my first Blog. And why is this my first Blog, I never felt that having my own Blog was necessary. I have had numerous Web Sites over the years, and I've always had the freedom of posting anything I wanted any time I wanted. So I never saw any benefit in Blogging....

Recently I was on this site and found a few Foxpro developers were posting here about Sedna and the October SP2 CTP release for VFP. I saw that the site was free and I could babble all I wanted. So I figured why not....

So what are my plans for this Blog... Well like the title says, Foxpro Ramblings... its my plan's to ramble on and on and on about Foxpro and my various projects here, as well as problems, ideas, and even the occasional complaint.

Whenever I run into an interesting problem relating to Foxpro, and I think about it I will try to be posting to this site about it.