Since 1994

1996 to 1999 : Information Trust Corporation (I.T.C.)

Information Trust Corporation, or ITC as they were then known, was a risk information management company in the same lines as Experian and others.  Much later they were bought out by TransUnion - long after I left.

I worked at ITC for two and a half years predominantly in Visual Basic, but as time progressed and the internet started becoming a real thing to be used, HTML became a bigger part of my job.

I started off, as said, working in Visual Basic, working on the internal hep desk system, informally known as the RFS system or, more formally, Request for Service System.  This was a thick-client application that was directly coupled to a MS-SQL database backend (client-server style) and was not multi-threaded or anything fancy.  The best we could do, at the time, was make sure we had enough SQL connections available in the pool to service the peak usage and gracefully handle connection failures with "please wait and try again soon" type messages.

As an analyst programmer, I was also tasked with helping people find solutions to their pain-points and spearheaded 2 other initiatives.  The one was building out an HTML version of the ITC "gazette" of judgements and other information, that would be distributed on micro-floppy disks (720kb in size) and I needed to code in such a way as to be able to split the gazette over multiple disks, if the gazette was too large for a single disk. This, of course, entailed some creative thinking and having to intelligently break html tables into smaller chunks (I recall there being some loading-time issues which would be laughable on today's computers) so that the html page loaded faster, but this also made it easier to create an index page that allowed for multi-disk distribution.  The other turnkey solution was a Business Information System that was required to import records from the IBM mainframe extracts and do reporting on them, as well as provide easy access to the data for the non-mainframe-terminal (i.e. PC) users. This was an early iteration, for me, o the ETL process and was a great introduction to real back-end data-processing and integration from one system to another.