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Catesby Design Limited has been established since 1989, providing consultancy services in the areas of software and digital hardware design and development. Since 2000, we have been offering our web site design and management services. See the Portfolio page for more details about some of the sites we manage or have worked on. Company History
As the use of internet protocols, particularly http, increased, server-side scripting technologies started to appear, and we started to develop systems based around Active Server Pages, Visual Basic and client-side javascript to implement systems that would have been Visual Basic applications only a short while before. With the rise of the Open-source software movement, we now embrace these tools and technologies as well. In particular, we use the PHP scripting language, MySQL database, and customisable packages such as Mambo, Joomla and osCommerce. |
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In the early days, we were involved in the design of digital electronic circuits, and
systems combining dedicated hardware and real-time control software. Software development
was mainly in various assembler languages but included some C, both cross-compiled and to
run on a PC controlling specialized hardware. The picture shows a
Disk Emulator card, used to test disk controller sub-systems
to ensure that they would work correctly with disk drives that
are operating at the edges of their specified performance
bands as well as with a typical example.
When Microsoft released Visual Basic, the company's focus changed to PC-based software
programming and the design of desktop applications in VB. Version 1 was widely regarded as
not a 'serious' development tool, mainly by those who had invested a great deal of time
learning C++. By the time version 3 was in use, with its ODBC database links, the myth had
been exposed. VB continues to be dominant even with the rise of intranets and the world
wide web. Related languages VBA and VBScript are finding their way into other areas, such
as office applications, as macro and scripting tools.