The PC
No one quite believed how far the PC would go
No one quite believed how far the PC would go
When I worked for Caterpillar in America I was exposed to the latest technologies: GPS had just been released and they were looking at appliocations for precision groundwork on their earthmoving equipment, but they also had IBM PCs running Lotus 123. In thiose days, there wern't enough computers for everyone so there were pool computers, and very few people ever used them. Except me.
I loved the interface, I loved Ashton Tate's Framework for word processing, dBASE for databases and Lotus 123 for spreadsheets. And the hardware was office-grade.
They also had VT-100 terminals that connected to their VAX mainframe. I could pull data from the VAX for analysis, bring it over in to the PC and analyse it, and I was so far ahead of what has happening in the UK office they kept on renewing my contract.
The VT-100 terminal menu also had a "remote dial" option and when talking to the UNIX Admins about this they let me in to the secret that this could be used to dial remote computers for public data access.... including games. This was of course a very dangerous option: I could access remote adventure games in work time!
It was one step from there to me buying PC magazines and deciding I wanted my own PC.
A Fountain XT with added RAM and a hugely expensive 1MByte hard drive was eventually delivered to my apartment, and Radio Shack sold me an internal 2400-bit modem, so I could spend my evening hours connected to adventure games and public Bulletin Boards across the US. With hindsight I suppose my phone bills must have been huge but as my expenses were paid for by my company I never really noticed nor indeed cared...
The PC had Lotus 123, or rather its free clone "as Easy As", and I became really good at driving it.
I bought Ashton Tate dBASE III and started programming databases. When my data sources became large, dBASE ran too slowly so I found a dBASE compiler called Clipper. The run-time speed was astounding.
I didn't realise it at the time, but I was fast becoming a PC expert.
When I eventually returned to the UK at athe end of my contract I found myself with huge quantities of PC knowledge and little desire to continue being a mechanical engineer. I stuck it out for a year while I contemplated my future but we all knew the writing was on the wall and eventually I chanced upon an advert for a PC technician for a big Corporate in London. I applied, was offered the job and my new life started.
I was employed to drag what was a somewhat backward company kicking and screaming in to the PC and modern telecommunications era which, over the next 11 years, I did. By the time I left everyone had a PC, secretaries were extinct and the company had a pukka Management Information System, not just a weekly A3 typed up (with TippEx!) summary sheet.