Following is a casual history of how Greg become interested in computers and software. This history will hopefully entertain you and give you an idea of our broad and long-running IT experience. Click the menu items on the left under Software to learn about recent projects and skills. You can click the images below to popup enlargements.

Ancient History

Orthogonal Programming's founder Greg Keogh was introduced to programming as a 5th form (year 11) student in 1973. Most of the students had gone away on a rather tedious and unattractive "school trip" for one week and the maths teacher asked the handful of remaining students what special interest topic they would like to play with. Greg suggested computer programming (but the exact reason for this suggestion is now forgotten). This struck an immediate resonance with the teacher, as his wife was a computer programmer who had overnight access to the computer centre at Monash University.

Minitran (Miniature FORTRAN) was written on punch cards where the chads were punched-out with the unwrapped tip of a paperclip. Although the output was old fashioned line-printer text on 15x11 inch paper, it was immediately obvious that this simple programming system could solve high-degree polynomial equations or plot complex functions in seconds that would take hours (or days) by hand or with a calculator. In this way Greg's love of computers began.

Early History

During the late 1970s Greg was a computer operator on Honeywell OS/2000 mainframe systems and mastered the assembly language of the machines in his spare time. The inaptly named Easycoder assembler language was extraordinarily difficult by modern standards but Greg used it to create many software utilities that were vital for company productivity.

In 1980, Greg became a full-time software developer and systems programmer on FACOM (later called Fujitsu) mainframes within a large payroll company and became a highly skilled and well organised systems programmer who used COBOL and OS/370 assembler to the limits of their capabilities. It was during this period that Greg learned the discipline of writing mission-critial software and managing large computer systems.

In the early 90s Greg worked as a consulting systems programmer on Fujitsu and IBM mainframes for a small company based in Sydney.

Recent History

In early 1992 Greg bought his first PC (a 486 DX-50 with 8MB of RAM) and the current Microsoft C/C++ 7.0 and SDK 3.1 development kits. This purchase saw the end of the mainframe world and a move to PC development. The period from 1993-2004 encompassed the following projects:

• Rostering and payroll applications on Windows and SCO Unix using Microsoft Cobol, AcuCobol, Visual C/C++, Watcom C++, GNU C++ and Borland C++.
• Cinema reserved ticketing system on OS/2 using Microfocus COBOL, Borland C/C++, VisualAge C++, native REXX, Visual REXX and Raima database.
• Real-time multi-language and localised visual testing systems on Windows using Borland C++ and Microsoft C++.
• Enterprise integration systems for Windows, Unix and OS/390 using Java and C++ with special focus upon distributed networking using JINI/JIRO technologies.
• Converting a DOS command line cryptographic workbench program into a multi-threaded DLL with a high-performance C++/MFC authored frontend.
• An ASP.NET website to collecting bookings for a catering service.
• An ASP.NET website to report upon construction industry data.
• A .NET desktop application to manipulate an electrial safety testing device.
• A .NET Client-Server desktop application to collect and print schedules for delivery drivers.

Popup screen shots of some of the recent projects are included on these pages: C#/VB .NET, ASP.NET and Windows.