paul.brett
Experienced Member
Hi,
I just wanted to share a couple of thoughts I was having about the first PC compatible I ever came across.
One of the first jobs I had on leaving high school was for the Post Office / Royal Mail Parcels (although they had just renamed themselves to Parcelforce because the overpaid marketing people told them it sounded cool.)
I got placed into the Personnel department, as unlike most of the other new entrants, I could actually read and write in English.
The department was run by a bunch of old geezers, who had for years been slaves to the heavily paper oriented way of managing day to day business.
In one corner of the office was a shiny new Compaq Deskpro computer with 8086 processor, 640k of RAM, a 5¼" floppy disk drive, a 20MB MFM harddrive and a super un-reliable 10MB Irwin tape drive.
The old farts thought this piece of equipment a work of pure evil, guaranteed to be a waste of time (secretly wishing it did not mean the loss of their jobs.)
Having used home computers for years, I took to it well. At first, I used only the personnel program that ran on it, and later (when I discovered how to break out of autoexec.bat) MS-DOS itself. I was absolutely beside myself when I found BASICA.EXE!
I wrote many programs to make my (extremely tedious) job a little less boring and did my best to show the others how it could also help them. I eventually got thrown out of the Personnel department and dumped into the wilder world of Management Accounting. They had lots of computers, and spent hours collating data, making reports and fancy coloured charts using computers and pen plotters. Much more my cup of tea.
Anyhow, I had better leave the story there, before I start banging on about SuperCalc 4 macros and games with hidden 'boss' screens to hide the fact that you're playing instead of working.
Paul.
I just wanted to share a couple of thoughts I was having about the first PC compatible I ever came across.
One of the first jobs I had on leaving high school was for the Post Office / Royal Mail Parcels (although they had just renamed themselves to Parcelforce because the overpaid marketing people told them it sounded cool.)
I got placed into the Personnel department, as unlike most of the other new entrants, I could actually read and write in English.
The department was run by a bunch of old geezers, who had for years been slaves to the heavily paper oriented way of managing day to day business.
In one corner of the office was a shiny new Compaq Deskpro computer with 8086 processor, 640k of RAM, a 5¼" floppy disk drive, a 20MB MFM harddrive and a super un-reliable 10MB Irwin tape drive.
The old farts thought this piece of equipment a work of pure evil, guaranteed to be a waste of time (secretly wishing it did not mean the loss of their jobs.)
Having used home computers for years, I took to it well. At first, I used only the personnel program that ran on it, and later (when I discovered how to break out of autoexec.bat) MS-DOS itself. I was absolutely beside myself when I found BASICA.EXE!
I wrote many programs to make my (extremely tedious) job a little less boring and did my best to show the others how it could also help them. I eventually got thrown out of the Personnel department and dumped into the wilder world of Management Accounting. They had lots of computers, and spent hours collating data, making reports and fancy coloured charts using computers and pen plotters. Much more my cup of tea.
Anyhow, I had better leave the story there, before I start banging on about SuperCalc 4 macros and games with hidden 'boss' screens to hide the fact that you're playing instead of working.
Paul.
