Douwe Egberts (1966 - 1974))

What have I done:

August 1966 - April 1970:

• I worked as an operator, analyst and programmer on the migration of all applications running on an IBM 1401 towards an IBM 360/40 mainframe.

April 1970 - February 1972:

• I was enlisted in the Royal Netherlands Air Force, and worked as a sergeant specialized in communication and cryptography.

February 1972 - February 1974:

• I worked as an analyst/programmer on the development of a material management system, billing system and cost-price calculations (IBM 370, batch applications in COBOL with IDMS-DB)

What did I learn:

In this job I learned all elementary skills to build and implement good programs. More specifically I learned to make effective use of the very limited capabilities that were available in that time-frame. The first IBM 'mainframe' that I worked with had an internal memory of 12Kb and an external RAMAC disk unit with a capacity of 1Mb and all information should fit on an 80 column (=bytes) punch-card.