FEW Cutting Tools

The problem

FEW had a WordPress website, a printed catalogue, quote requests by e-mail and phone, and a set of factory calculation programs written in Eloquence BASIC. Those programs run on a single Windows XP computer. Very few people still read Eloquence, and nobody wants to find out what happens when that machine stops booting.

What I built

One Laravel 13 API on PostgreSQL and Redis, with four Vue 3 + TypeScript single-page apps on top of it:

• The website, with branches, office hours, FAQs and downloads served from the API.
• An online shop: the printed catalogue as data (one file per catalogue page), search by name, catalogue page or FEW code, a quote list instead of a cart, and customer accounts that show the status of each request.
• A sales dashboard where staff work through quote requests, edit them, and keep internal notes. Every change is kept in the request’s history with who made it and when.
• A staff calculator that runs the ported factory programs on the server, behind a login.

The hard part

The calculator has to give exactly the answers the old programs give, bugs included. So I documented how Eloquence rounds and reads input before porting anything, and I port one program at a time, each with tests against the original’s output.

Where the old code looks wrong, I don’t quietly fix it. Each suspicion goes on a findings list for FEW to decide, from a missing comma in a data list to a variable that is never set. The number field even accepts sums like “16 + 0.381”, because that is how the staff typed into the old program.