Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine led me to leave a safe, steady, somewhat boring job with Bell to join a project doing a new 'word processor' from AES (remember them?) just as the new IBM 'PC' spelled the death knell of single function computers. Of course, no dot matrix printer could have the quality of a good Daisy Wheel (tm?) printer with a specialized driver that could vary the hammer force for perfectly even black letters. Wow! Then came laser printers... oops. What a disaster that turned into!
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