Quote:
Originally Posted by sabredog
I had a better PC, running AutoCAD and road design software. An ultrafast 286 8Mhz, 640Kb RAM, crisp EGA, massive 40Mb HDD and efficient MS-DOS 3.22
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Uh-huh. Great stuff for the era.
We had a PGA card in our secure computing PC; an AT/370 that had a mainframe CPU coprocessor card to run downloaded mainframe code.
Fun times.
I got dragged into the whole PC revolution when word got around the office that I had a home computer and the Division Chief called me in one day to tell me the Division Offices were getting a Wang Set-up with all the trimmings for the secretaries and to ask what I thought of it.
I was dubious about the deal and pointed out that for far less than the $30K price of the Wang setup (dot matrix impact printer, no less) they could've bought 5 PCs and one of the New-fangled Laser printers, plus the Wang for PC software suite.
(Which was apparently what he wanted to hear. He was very much into tools and productivity boosts.)
The Wang was being paid for by the higher ups so he had no control but a few weeks after the system was installed the facilities folks shut down the A/C for a weekend in august. Come Monday morning, the Wang system was dead as a doorknob. The two PCs (one AT and one AT/370) we had worked fine.
It took a week to get the Wang back up and the Powers To be heard all about it from him.
Next Fiscal Year, we had a separate Tools and Computing budget and we sarted building up an independent computing capability of our own.
Within 5 years we went from relying on centralized mainframes and terminals to a fully integrated network of PCs and UNIX Workstations that gave us CRAY-level compute power on the desktops and the boss was routinely showing it off to his peers and superiors. Productivity went up by literally a couple of orders of magnitude and we started getting entire projects at the expense of other groups.
This did not endear us to the Centralized IT crowd when the IBM sales folk started quoting us as an example of how much better their RISC gear was.
That was a time of rapid change and we were lucky to have a boss who saw the disruption as an opportunity to grow his empire rather than as a threat to "the way things are done".
It pays to get in front of tech change instead of fighting it.
But not many organizations understand that; they see the threat instead of the opportunity.