Business management software for Amway
Amway is a multi level marketing company selling household products. My parents were quite senior in it and I had just started. I saw a need for simplifying the administration and I also has a drive to learn how my computer worked.
In this year I had finished and started selling software I had created on a ZX Spectrum. It was written in Basic and manged stock, sales and up-line and down-line payments for people in the network.
While the ZX Spectrum was a huge innovation, it was a world away from modern computing. I had preciously owned a ZX80, and strangely used a ZX80 chipset for binary and assembly programming in my Electrical and Electronic coursework.
The structure of the database on the Spectrum was so complex that I had to know the number of bytes for each row of data and use complex maths in code to calculate the record location relative to other records and know where it lay in memory in order to do calculations and display the results. Quite an achievement for a teenager. I'm not so sure I could repeat this today.
The software tape sold quite a few copies until people started copying it themselves. Pirates within Amway killed any progression. Still it was a great hobby.
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