Re: old school

Subject: Re: old school
From: Janice Gelb <Janice -dot- Gelb -at- Sun -dot- COM>
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Date: Tue, 20 May 2008 21:45:55 +1000

Chris Morton wrote:
> dBase III was one of the first computer courses I took. WordPerfect gave me
> a copy of their then-new, flagship word processor to try out for about six
> months. I opted for WordStar 2000 on my IBM-XT with its whopping 10MB hard
> disk and 640K.

Wow, a hard disk! We were so excited when we got those,
and 10MB was unheard of storage space :-> Remember dual-
floppy drives when you had to have a key on a floppy disk
inserted in one of the drives in order to run an application?
(The XT had one of my favorite keyboards, and then they
replaced it with the noisy uncomfortable AT keyboard.)

> Taking my wife and kids through the Smithsonian a few years later, I was
> amazed to find a full set of Windows 1.0a on 5-1/4" floppy disks in a glass
> display. I told them I still had my copy, which—along with the first edition
> of Aldus PageMaker—pretty much launched my career as a trainer and technical
> writer. Prior to that I had spent 12 years in advertising sales, where the
> Xacto was KING and the Compugraphic 9600 was something out of the future.
>

Um, not sure about the Compugraphic 9600 being something
out of the future. Windows 1.0 would have been about 1985
or so and when I was running the Compugraphic in 1978, it
was older technology even then -- only one support engineer
for the entire Southeastern US still knew how to diagnose
and repair one. If I had a problem and he was out of town
or otherwise unavailable, I had to wait until they could
contact him to get it fixed.

I know what you mean about the Smithsonian, though. Went
to the launch of their Information Age exhibit several
years ago with a friend who had graduated UC Berkeley
with a CS degree in 1971. He walked out feeling very old...

-- Janice

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References:
Re: RE: old school: From: quills
Re: RE: old school: From: John Hedtke
RE: RE: old school: From: Al Geist
RE: RE: old school: From: John Hedtke
Re: old school: From: Beth Agnew
Re: old school: From: Chris Morton

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