Messina Electronics - Johannesburg, South Africa
[1982 - 1984] continued...

I learnt the Motorola 6800 Assembler language. I used it, to modify and to add functionality to the PCL language interpreter or to write hardware test programs for the memory, screen, ports and peripheral devices. One such modification was the replacement of the unreliable cassette tape with battery-backed CMOS memory. This mod ensured that "set-points" that were loaded on startup, in a brewing application, remained in storage and were available at all times, even if the computer was restarted either manually, or automatically as a result of a power failure. This brewing control application operated at a number of large breweries around South Africa, including Garankuwa Breweries in Bophutatswana.

I supported the Commander accounting system, used by the administration of the Messina Mines, located in the very northern part of South Africa, on the border with Zimbabwe. It took a two hours flight in a Beachcraft Baron dual engine airoplane to get to Messina, where I spent the day repairing and testing their system and returned to Johannesburg that same evening, with the same aeroplane and same pilot.

Bateman Process Instrumentation - Johannesburg, South Africa
[1985 - 1989]

With the advent of the IBM-PC, in the early days of MS-DOS (v2.1), BPI distributed and supported "ONSPEC" - a supervisory system designed in the USA by "Heuristics" (today's Automation ONSPEC Software Inc.), which operated on the rather sophisticated, way ahead of its time, Digital Research Concurrent CP/M-86 Operating System. BPI had limited access to the Pascal MT+ source code, for which I was responsile for providing local support. The package provided links to user written communication drivers, which I have used to develop a number of additional drivers for Modicon, Omron and Conet controllers.