20 years with A-measurements in databases |
|
 |
|
Head of R&D at Isabella, Peder Odgaard, says it all began when his father, Søren Odgaard, the company’s founder, said: “Perhaps we should take a look at these computer things and see if they might be of some use to us?" Initially, Peder Odgaard was not keen on the idea - his hand drawings were fine, and he did not see any reason to use a computer. A friend told him that she had taken a one-year programming course and that she was now able to print out a letter. Peder Odgaard thought this sounded odd, and he certainly did not want to spend a year learning how to print something out on paper. But then, at the beginning of 1985, came the Apple Macintosh, which used a mouse, a desktop, folders and icons and other features now familiar from many operating systems. “It was right up my street,” recalls Peder Odgaard, and in the autumn of 1985 the company bought its first computer - a Macintosh Plus with 512 KB RAM, 20 MB external hard disk and a laser printer - and all for the princely sum of around £5,000. Peder recalls: “I think we bought the hard disk as a bit of an afterthought. To use the machine, you had to boot it using one disk, wait for it to start up, remove the disk |
|||||||||
and use another if you wanted to save any data.” Initially, Peder was mostly interested in Illustrator, an illustration program which he wanted to use so that he could commit some of the technical drawings for awning designs to a digital medium. But then Peder Odgaard discovered Filemaker, probably the simplest database tool in the world as anyone who has ever used it would no doubt agree. Suddenly collating, updating and managing the A-measurement data became an easy task, and remains so to this day. The A-measurement database now holds more than 12,800 caravan measurements from 1985-2005. The data is still held on Apple Macintosh computers, and Filemaker continues to be used to manage the figures. Links: www.apple.com | www.filemaker.com |
|||||||||
 |
|||||||||
 |
|||||||||
Isabella’s first computer, an Apple Macintosh Plus, from 1985 |
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
