I Remember That!

The first PC application I ever used was the original Lotus 1-2-3. I would sit in from of a Compaq "luggable" for 8 hours a day running revenue analysis for funeral homes, trying to figure out how a new business could afford a bank loan, tracking cash that clients tried to hide from us (and by extension, the IRS) through a maze of interconnected businesses, client lists, due dates, you name it. All stored on 5 1/4" floppies that could only hold 360K. That wasn't a big deal when the Compaq only had 256K RAM, but when I upgraded it to 1024K, suddenly you could make a spreadsheet that you couldn't save. I solved that by replacing one of the floppy drives with a full-height monster 10MB hard drive that sounded like a cement mixer when you accessed data on it.

Ah, the memories. My fingers still reach for the / key everytime I want insert a row or save a file or format a cell, even though I haven't used 1-2-3 since the late 1980's. Those commands are in muscle memory meaning that it's just like riding a bike. The body never forgets.

That wasn't the first computer application I used. Before hiring into the CPA firm where I learned 1-2-3, I got to play with an IBM System 36 and RPG II. If you look at the picture at that link, the bulge on the top left is the 8" floppy drive; the one on the top right was used to IPL the system and perform some maintenance tasks that couldn't be done from a terminal. The system in the picture could hold one or even two hard drives. And a second chassie could be mounted on the side (it was the same height and depth, and half the width of the main unit) that would hold up to two more hard drives. You could have as little drive space as a single 30MB drive, or as much as 4 716MB drives. As late as the early 1990's, the software I worked on for VWoA had to fit on a 60MB machine so the dealerships wouldn't have to upgrade their hardware, because any sort of ugrade started in the 5 figures.

I'm typing this on a decrepit laptop with only a gig of RAM, 100GB hard drive and a lousy 1.6GHz dual core with a connected Drobo that has 3 500GB drives giving 1TB usable disk space. All for half what that Compaq luggable cost.