Craven was fortunate to secure part-time work in the last three years of school working as a PC tech at a company initially called “Computer Warehouse” later changed to “Select Data Systems”.
He learnt a lot from the workshop techs and it set him on an eventual path to delve deeper into Novell, then Microsoft server and became interested in networking systems.
He developed several systems while at school as a teenager for the odd business to automate / manage certain tasks – eg. a quoting system for a furniture store and a ice-cream cart management & tracking system.
These were written in the database management system, Clipper based on the dBase III and IV programming script language.
After matriculating, he continued with his relational database programming business and called it Kondura Software Developments.
He developed a full retail Point of Sale, loyalty rewards and retail system for a national perfume and clothing franchise, “Orderite Perfumes” aka “Cupidolls” as well as various other projects.
He briefly worked for a company called DigiPoint in East London and wrote a meal-booking system which eventually was used at many Technikons and universities in the region with intention of selling nationally.
A dispute arose and he left the company when the software proved to be a success and the directors decided that they wanted a larger portion of the profits (all of it) in contrast to what was intimated on joining the company.
He later developed in Clarion, Clarion for Windows, FoxPro, touched on C in a SCO UNIX environment and began selling and supporting computer hardware. He was ahead of the game with his knowledge of Windows 3.11 and Windows 95.
He maintained and used these programming skills later in his ICT computer support business to write simple work-around applications to assist attorneys with their interest-calculating and “file-away” systems (document tracking) in the early 2000’s.