kids bring laptops to class?

michuncle
Wed, 05 Apr 2006 23:35:11 +0000

“Back in the day” is relative!

In the late 70’s and early 80’s, I worked for a subsidiary of Xerox and played with a Fuji-Xerox Star document processor. It had this funny GUI interface with a single button “mouse”. The company was working on Asian/English language documentation for a while. The project never got off the ground and we shipped the machine back to Japan.

Then there was the $10,000 Apple Lisa for some database/spreadsheet work. Way too expensive for what an IBM PC could do for less money…

Thus enterprise computing was born and IBM/Microsoft won the hearts and minds of corporate IT staffs weaned on the mainframe business. Apple went their own way…