Early Computer Memories

[eytonxav]

In 1977, Ken Olsen, the founder and CEO of Digital Equipment Corp. said that "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in the home".

At the time, the 32-bit superminis made by Digital were kicking ass, and they were eating the lunch of the mainframers like IBM, Univac, Burroughs, CDC, etc...

And guys like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs could see it coming. Bill dropped out of Harvard to found Microsoft, saying that it would be too late if he waited till he finished school.

Bill was lucky to be at the right time, but he put himself in the right place!

Back in the early 80s, I was the Planning and Administration Manager for a large mega-corp's IT function. I had a big argument with my colleagues who had taken the position that PC's had no place in our IT infrastructure. I told them that if we do not support PC's the user community will go around us. They would not agree with me, but you know who won that argument in the end.

 

[samclem]

More memories:

Formatting blank disks.

How about the tattered paper/laminated template that was at the top of 90% of keyboards. Usually it had the shortcuts for Wordstar, PeachText, or whatever other programs were most used there.

I think it's funny that the "save" icon in modern software is still usually a cartoon of a 3.5" diskette, something that some young users have probably never seen.

 

[Walt34]

Oh yes, floppies.

Doing data recovery for someone desperate to recover a report that they'd been working on for weeks to a single floppy and "lost" usually because they yanked it out of the computer before the drive had finished writing to the disk.

First thing was to copy the disk, including all unallocated space. That so if I screwed it up I could still make another copy from the original and start over.

I was usually able to recover the data or at least a reasonably recent previous version. That made our unit a hero to a lot of people.