About

I would like to take this opportunity to introduce you to not only my business Great Atlantic Computer Services, but to the experiences that I have accumulated over the past 20 years in the computer industry.

My name is David Blake and I envisioned and created GACS. My wife and I have lived in Virginia Beach, Virginia for 25 years.  I have vast experience with Visual FoxPro as a programmer for over 10 years. My love of the computer industry first started in 1983 while working with xBase software tools using Ashton-Tate’s dBase III on a DOD (US Navy) project that I worked on part-time while attending college. I graduated from Old Dominion University (Norfolk, VA) in 1984 with a BS in Electrical Engineering and minor concentration in Computer Science. I enjoyed computer science so much that I elected to make a career in the microcomputer field.

After working with dBase for several years, I migrated to Clipper and FoxBase to provide compiled applications for distribution. With these applications, I created and marketed a consumer electronics repair shop product called TechServ which was written in a DOS version of Clipper.This project was successful and the application was sold to over 250 service shops nation wide. There are still many of the TechServ applications in use today. Projector Recorder Belt Corporation in Wisconsin was so impressed with TechServ that they offered me a contract to create a FoxBase application for their company. This application provided a cross-reference search tool of their entire inventory of consumer electronic rubber parts manufactured at the PRB facility. The micro computer business world started migrating to Windows at this time and the interest in TechServ started to weaken. I didn’t feel there was enough interest in the product to justify porting it to a Windows platform, so I looked for other areas in the computer industry in which to gain additional computer skills.

I accepted a position working as a computer instructor with AmerInd, Inc. I enjoyed teaching computer classes and working with UNIX, but missed working with FoxPro. Instructors pay is much lower than a skilled computer programmer, so it wasn’t productive to make that a permanent stopping place for my computer experience.

When the opportunity to convert an FAA financial project from FoxPro 2.0 to FoxPro 2.5 for Windows was presented, I took the challenge. After working on the FAA project for a year, they decided to move their office to Northern Virginia. I was not interested in moving from the Hampton Roads area at that time and knew that more challenging computer work was waiting for me.

I took a position working for CACI International, Inc on a DOD (US Navy) project. The project was called Technical Library Management System (TLMS) and was used on Navy ships to track the usage of technical manuals. My conversion skills were required to convert the FoxPro DOS based application to Windows. I originally converted the application to FoxPro 2.6 for Windows. Shortly after, Microsoft released Visual FoxPro 3.0 and I talked management into porting the application to 3.0 to take advantage of the object oriented aspect of the new release. After attending several Visual FoxPro classes, I had no idea of what the future held for the new visual product, but I was sold on the visual concept from my view point.

The Navy position gave me the opportunity to work from home. I spent several years working on the TLMS project along with other telecommuters from as far away as Tennessee. The telecommuting work environment was ideal in many ways. I didn’t have to battle the naval base traffic in Norfolk every day, plus the gasoline savings was a great plus.  Everything could be accomplished using my high speed internet connection including Instant Messaging, Net Meeting, and file transfers. The best part of working at home was the peace and quiet. In an office environment there are so many distractions. I was more than twice as productive at home doing the same task, because I could maintain concentration for longer periods of time.

The Iraq war efforts and the fight against terrorism drained the funding for many of the DOD (Navy) software projects, including the TLMS project. So after the project folded, I decided to start my own consulting business.

I am thrilled to see that after ten plus years, Visual FoxPro is still going strong. Microsoft just released their new 9.0 version of the product. I have been working with other web enabled programming tools like ASP, JSP, PHP, VB.NET, Java 2, Dreamweaver, and Coldfusion. They are great tools, but Visual FoxPro is my passion and I would prefer to work in the VF environment.

This may have been a lengthy introduction, but I sincerely want my clients to know about my extensive computer skills background, and to be comfortable with the service that I can offer.