Internship

A Routing System Developed During an Internship

In 1985-1986, at the end of my course in Computer Science Technology, in order to obtain my programmer-analyst diploma (DEC) at the cegep Montmorency, I did an height months internship with a fellow student, a colleague, in an enterprise called Extermination Trans-Metrople/Fertivert.

In fact, Extermination Trans-Metropole was the main enterprise and Fertivert was a franchise owned by the first company. Fertivert was offering a service of lawn care treatments such as:

• Pre-Emergent & Targeted Weed Control
• Fertilization
• Aeration



Picture 1: My alumna Michèle Labrèche

• Lime Soil Amendment

My Colleague on that Project

I have accomplished this project with a colleague, my alumna Michèle Labrèche (c.f. picture 1):

Project Description

Simply put, the client wanted to have a database of his customers and to be able to generate various reports from the information stored in that database.

Picture 2: The IBM PC-XT.

But the most important report that had to be generated for was a routing list.  For example, if one day a technician needs to visit all the customer located in a given city, for example Longueuil, then we would extract from the database all the customers where the city is LONGUEUIL, and sort that sublist on the postal code.

If you sort a list on the postal code, it will give you a route to follow to visit them. It is so good that if you have six customers on a given street, you will visit them in order from one side of the street and visit the other customers on the other side of the street when you come back. Thanks to CANADA POST for implementing the postal codes system.

The Hardware We Had at our Disposal

The application had to run on an original IBM PC-XT (c.f. picture 2), with 640 KB of RAM and a 20 MB hard-drive and a monochrome display adapter. At the time, the price for such a machine was around $10,000.00.

The Analysis

After doing the analysis, we recommended to developed the application in Turbo Pascal 2.0 and with a commercial B-Trees package to implement the database. Such a package was available from Borland. I had written myself previously a Turbo Pascal module to create and manage input forms with full editing commands and data validation and I was planning to use that in our application to manage screen inputs using forms and menus in the application. This would have enable us to create a very performant (fast) application on the given hardware.

We Changed our Plan According to the Customer

There was an employee at Fertivert, Eduardo, working for the company. He had some knowledge about computing because he had a certificate in computer sciences. A certificate is 10 courses (or two full time sessions at the university).

He explained to us what he wanted and gave us some guidelines to develop the system and asked us to use Aston-Tate's dBase II instead of Turbo Pascal. For him, if the system was developed using dBase II, then it would be easier for him to create new reports and modify the system after we would be gone.

He was right, and we complied.

But, we have found out in the end that dBase II was a program with some disadvantages:

• dBase II code was interpreted, not compiled.
• dBase II was a language with a lot of bugs, not to say incomplete.
• It was only possible to open and use two tables at one given time.
  This was a major flaw, because opening and closing tables added latency in a system that was already slow.
• dBase II wasn't a true relational database management system (RDBMS):
• No security.
• No user concurrent access (but it was not needed then).
• No real SQL.

In other words, the system worked fine, was corresponding to the needs of the client, but it was a bit slow.

Successful Outcome

Nevertheless, we have succeed in delivering what the customers wanted and they were satisfied.

So satisfied  they gave me (to my parents in fact) two years of free law care treatments. After that, my parents continued the service again for several years after. Our lawn was really green, good looking, no weed, no dandelion...

Today, pesticides are banned. Very bad for the environment. Some studies showed that it can cause various illnesses and cancers in animals and humans.

So today, I don't treat my lawn. It's full of pretty yellow flowers of dandelion and other plants, and I live with that. Anyway, monocultures are not natural. Monocultures can lead to the quicker spread of pests and diseases, where a uniform crop is susceptible to a pathogen.