Milton Keynes based Xitec Software were developing software to help big companies that still ran ICL mainframes to overcome the Y2K problem. Xitec’s development environment allowed companies to run their mainframe programs on a PC. Any Y2K problems could be identified, fixed and thoroughly tested on the PC before the solution was deployed back to the mainframe.
I started working on various Windows based utilities to enhance the PC development environment. These were developed in C++ and MFC using Visual Studio 4. Over time I found myself writing more COBOL and less C++. I didn’t want my programming career to move in that direction so after just one year of working at Xitec I decided to become a contract programmer.