A Coder Interview With Mike Meinz

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I’m retired. When I started my career, programming projects consisted of plugging wires into plug boards to create punch card processing applications to be run on electrical accounting machine like the IBM 402, 407, 085, 088, 514, 519, etc. From there, I moved to writing SPS and Autocoder applications on an IBM 1401 with 4K of memory eventually upgraded to 16K of memory. After many years of migrating my skills to various languages on various hardware platforms, I became an Information Technology Director where I didn’t need to program anymore. So, starting in 1996, I volunteered my time with a local community cable television organization and built some applications to help them run their operations. Originally in Clipper Summer 1987 and later Clipper 5.2, I migrated and enhanced those applications to VB .NET 2003 in 2003. I retired from my full-time job in 2010. Since then, I have continued to support the local community cable tv organization's applications. In 2013, I migrated the VB .NET 2003 Solution to VB .NET 2012 so that it can run on 64-bit computers and interact with Microsoft Office 2010. The upgrade went smoothly. In mid 2013, I developed a VB .NET 2012 application for them to download election results data from the Secretary of State's web site, format the results and send them to a VizRT character generator for on-air display.