Sarasota
Arthur Andersen, Sarasota, was unlike any of the other Arthur Andersen offices. No auditing, no consulting. This one bought a tax program from Don Moulton (where I had helped build the prototype 10 years earlier) and expanded it to included all types of tax forms (1065, 990, etc). (See Allison-Crain) I was hired as Project Leader to create the 1040 Electronic Filing Product, an add-on option to their 1040 product. The product had client and server components. The client checked that all of the 250 IRS electronic filing rules had been observed, converted a tax return to the IRS's format, and transmitted the tax return to the server component over the phone line. Twice a day the server component would call each of the 7 IRS district offices, transmit the returns and pick up the results from the previous day's transmissions. The server component would then build a reply file for each client to pick up the next time they called in.
The 1040 Tax program was written in MS DOS-Basic and called the 1040 EF program to validate the return and transmit it. I wrote the pilot client and server programs in C, but since there was no GUI for C in 1992, Foxpro was selected for the production version of the client. Foxpro was selected for the server component because there was a lot of database work involved. A programmer was added to my staff to write the client component and interface with the 1040 Basic program. I wrote the communications program in C and then 3 more programmers were added to help with the server component and the Validation component, which was written in DOS C++. This was the first OOD project for AA Sarasota.
So the tax data came from a Basic program using Btrieve, was processed by the client Foxpro program, was validated by a C++ program, sent to the server by a C program, and it worked. The first year, only employees used it. The second year, all Arthur Andersen 1040 customers could use it.
But the server component could do much more, so the ability to provide instant program updates of all 450 tax programs was added (no wait for the weekly CD). The client program sent a list of all installed products and the release level of each. The server component put together a package of all updates needed to bring the customer up to date, and returned the package in one 6 second process.
The ability to make purchases online was then added.
And then along came Windows.