The first professional program that I wrote was way back in 1998 along with Gaurang where we both created an accounting, inventory and point of sales system for the Air Force Wives Welfare Association (AFWWA) in Hindon. It was the first paid project that we both worked on while still in school. We developed the system called Vent over a few months before our class 12th exams started and deployed it at Hindon, then we both got busy studying for the board exams and then with college. There was a lot of demand for deploying it at other AFWWA locations but because we were both not in India (I was in US and Gaurang was in UK) we didn’t really work on it. AFWWA continue to use the software for 5 more years till an OS upgrade caused the software to stop working and they had to replace the entire system.
Vent was created because we were bored and instead of studying went to watch the demo of a Point of Sales (PoS) system for AFWWA to see what profession software looked like. After seeing the demo we were not impressed and told everyone that the software was so bad that we could develop something better and they took us up on that. We both actually met with accountants, sales personnel and others to learn Accounting, understand inventory control and how point of sales systems work. After that we created a system where each sales terminal functioned as a thin client with a central server running the core software which was written in C++.
We called it Vent because we both suck at naming things, so when we had to name it we were both brain storming and started thinking about alternatives for Windows. Obviously Doors sounded pretty stupid so we called it Vent.
Me and Gaurang have been talking about taking the original code and uplifting it so that it works on modern systems on and off for the past 28 years. The latest iteration was a couple of weeks ago with another late night conversation with Gaurang where we spoke about converting it to Unix compatible C code and releasing it as open source.
But there was a major snag that was stopping us from proceeding with the plan. We had the original source code because I back up everything, but we had stored the custom header files for the system in the Includes folder for TurboC IDE and I couldn’t find a copy of the Includes directory anywhere. This meant that the code couldn’t be compiled without us reverse engineering the code and recreating all the header files from scratch. Obviously this would have been a major effort so we didn’t really look at it seriously.
Today after not having slept all night, I decided to search for it again and was going through my backup drive where I found the zip version of the Turbo C++ installation directory. This version had a copy of the original includes folder so after 28 years we have all the files required to be able to compile the program again.
Immediately shared it with Gaurang and we are both going to work on uplifting the code. Looking up the code it doesn’t seem too complicated to convert it to Unix code so my next project is going to be doing just that. I am probably going to do the conversion manually with lots of help from Google but Gaurang is going to try using one of the AI coding agents to help convert. Not sure how I feel about that but if it helps convert the code easily then I guess we can try it out.
Looking at the code I can see that we can make a whole lot of improvements and additional features can be added to the code but that will be in phase II.
Keep an eye out on this space for updates on the project. When I last checked they were not that many open source point of sales system available in the market so I think they will be a demand for this, but even if there isn’t much demand I would still want to resurrect my first project. 🙂 A bonus finding was that we can also compile our senior project again (because we now have the headers for that as well) which was a clone of MS Paint for DOS.
Well this is all for now will write more later.
– Suramya