26 Years of Delphi
Great memories.<p>Delphi was my first programming language. I learned it from programming magazines I used to buy when I was about 17 years old or so.<p>My dad had a small supermarket at that time, and I remember the first useful program I built in my life was a small application to scan discount coupons he used to accept. Those coupons had a barcode and I discovered the hand scanners we used were just doing keyboard emulation. So I wrote an application in Delphi that would allow my father to scan all coupons at the end of the day and then print a sheet with a table of quantities, amounts, subtotals and totals of the money he had in coupons... something he was doing by hand before this. He was so happy with this program.<p>The program itself was very, very, very shitty, but it worked well for him. For example, at that point I didn&#x27;t even knew that arrays existed, so all the logic and multiplication was done manually, like label43 = textInput25 * textInput24 * 0.1.<p>I also remember that, in order to send the form to the printer, I wrote code to go control by control, change the background to white, the border to black, calling something like form.printForm() and then restoring all the colors. This caused a horrible flickering when printing... but hey... it worked!!<p>The best memories I have was that probably, this was the first time I had that &quot;feeling&quot; of having built something useful to somebody. And certainly the best moment was when one of his suppliers who also accepted those coupons asked us for a copy of the program. Great times.<p>Some days I feel like I&#x27;ve never have built something as useful again since then .