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During high-school, I had worked several summers for my cousin at Cedarbrae Volkswagen in Scarborough Ontario. When he heard that I was looking for a job, he hired me to run his rental department. We had about 35 cars for rent to service and bodyshop customers, as well as a few retail customers. All record-keeping was done on a magnetic board with colour-coded markers for the cars. All contracts were hand-written with 4 carbon copies.
At some point, a brand-new IBM 286 showed up on my desk. I figured I should use it to simplify my record-keeping. Remembering that Q&A had a database component, I purchased a copy and started learning it more thoroughly. I eventually developed a rental-management application using both the word processing and database features. It wasn't fancy, but it kept records of the regular customers and printed out the forms. The project was also my first attempt at computer programming in about 10 years.
I had kept in touch with an earlier room-mate, Dave Harms. He had gotten excited about Clarion, an early template-driven design environment. I developed a basic CRM application with Clarion, and prepared it for commercial sale. I actually had one sale to another car dealership, in Traverse City Michigan. Clarion is still used for vertical-market custom applications. Dave has been publishing Clarion Magazine for quite a few years now at http://www.clarionmag.com.
When my cousin sold Cedarbrae, I worked for Orchestra London in London Ontario for 10 months as Director of Development. During my tenure, it was determined that a new ticketing system was required. I assisted in the selection of a custom developer who turned out to use Clarion. I had a small part in that development. Once I left the Orchestra, I returned to self-employment and developed a number of applications in Clarion, but abandoned it when Clarion for Windows came out. I never got comfortable with it, and switched to SuperBase as the best alternative.
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