Hi George,

Yes, the time and billing system I wrote in North Star Basic had a text file to hold time transaction. I use various routime to sort the text file using bubble sorts, quick sorts, etc. Because of the limitation in floppy space (eg on 180K), and memory (eg 32K), I eventual starting using an subset of the actual transaction, which only included the relavent keys in doing my sorts. Each key record had the record number which pointed to the entire transaction held on disk. When running reports I would sort the index in memory, which was very limited, and then grab the entire record from disk to print out reports. It work pretty good. AS someone once said, necessity is the mother of all inventions.

When I found Dbase II (the CP/M version that worked on a North Star computer), I fully appreciated what I had found. It was wounderful.

LelandJ