I recently received an email from Jeff Hawn, Chairman and CEO of the Attachmate Group, announcing Attachmate’s acquisition of Novell, Inc. That email caused me to pause and reminisce about my very productive and fruitful days as an Attachmate user.
In those days, we used Attachmate’s terminal emulation software as our primary means of connectivity with our mainframe business applications. That product came equipped with its own built-in scripting tool, a version of VBScript known as ExtraBasic.
Positioned as it was at the point through which most data passed, and at the fingertips of every user on every desktop, ExtraBasic offered considerable strategic and competitive advantage. It was only a short time before we users realized how to leverage ExtraBasic to capitalize on the data flow.
Although our initial developments were simple macros and shortcuts, we eventually went a little crazy. To take advantage of ExtraBasic’s full COM support, we developed functionally rich DLLs, which together became the basis for full-featured and nearly standalone applications, interfaces with local data bases and lots of automated data entry. And oh, how we had our way!
I know more than a few seasoned tactical developers who cut their coding teeth on ExtraBasic, and proceeded from there to success on many other platforms. And we all came to understand and appreciate the value and the power of having our hands in the code.
Mr. Hawn and the folks at Attachmate are to be commended for putting development tools into the hands of operative users at the point of contact with their applications, and for launching or forwarding the careers of tactical developers everywhere.
From this tactical developer, thanks, and best of fortune in your future endeavors.
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