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What joy !!! I came upon this thread while searching for something else and now I've wasted the best part of an evening on it.
It's brought back tons of memories. I've still got my slide rule but my Sinclair Cambridge calculator ended up in bits after I threw it at a wall. My later Oxford calculator was traded up by Sinclair for 2 Oxfords after I sent it back for repair. Older than that is my first portable typewriter (an Olivetti) which is still in a cupboard somewhere.
Around that time, I was running stocktakes in a steel tube works on punchcards, which required processing overnight on a large mainframe housed in a (very) large air-conditioned room. My first office desktop computer had the custom-built app coded in Basic and the data on large (8"?) floppies.
My first portable was a luggable, a 'Phillips' badged version of some other suitcase sized machine (maybe an Osborne?) with a tiny monochrome (greenish) screen and using 5" floppies. I flew with that machine a few times between France and UK. It used CP/M and I worked with WordStar. I've still got that machine with handbooks somewhere in store. I used first a dot-matrix printer and then upgraded to a daisy wheel (which I've still got somewhere - together with an old fax machine).
Later, I moved to a smaller Toshiba portable and spent a weekend wondering how to cope with DOS after CP/M without any handbook supplied by the seller.
Then in the office, I was given a Dell 286 and enjoyed working with WordPerfect. Colleagues in the US recommended Windows as a must-have so I bought Windows v1 and spent the afternoon loading it up from what seemed like hundreds of floppies. Windows wasn't an OS at that time. By the end of the afternoon, it was uninstalled and relegated to the office waste paper basket. And I continued with WordPerfect under DOS which suited me well.
I came back to Windows at v3.11, again after colleagues in the US said it had improved by that time. My next trauma came from attending a training course on the use of Word. I remember being horrified at the complexity of styles so I continued with WordPerfect which was fine until it was eventually taken over by Novell.
That period of history was dominated by the rapid increase in processor speed to the point that there was real interest and utility in buying the next generation as soon as it was released. So hardware was updated regularly.
My first linux installation was in the same year that I discovered the internet - around 1990-91 iirc, and it involved hours of trial and error to get a version of Slackware running and talking to the hard disk. Now my linux box is my main work tool but I keep a W10 box for a couple of applications that are not easily run on linux.
Since WordPerfect, I've tried Vi, Emacs and others but found OpenOffice and later LibreOffice Writer to be my preference these days. When I think of that early training course on Word and the horrors I experienced with styles, I still find it hard to believe that today I can't do without them, typically having five page styles, 10-15 paragraph styles and numerous text styles in any given document.
When talking to fellow writers, I'm constantly dismayed at their ignorance of styles and have attempted to convince them that they would find it easy to learn to set them up even in Word and that is one reason that I keep a copy of MS Office on the W10 box. Personally, I find it easier to set up styles in LibreOffice Writer than in Word but you can do it all in Word if that's all you've got.
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