And Norton Commander on 'top' of DOS (version 5 or something)

And Norton Commander on 'top' of DOS (version 5 or something)

I had Norton Commander over DOS 6.22 and it was great.

Just remembering how, during the 50's and 60's, punch cards tagged every aspect of our lives...and God forbid you should tear, staple or fold or allow to get wet. Every form you filled out was also a punch card and trying to write legibly around the punch holes was an art. Damage a punch card and your University class schedule evaporated, your health records gone and bills paid got posted to the wrong account.

One of my first jobs was in the "Tab" room of a major corporation, sorting and compiling tens of thousands of cards a day. The machines were old and read the cards mechanically, with pins, and would frequently jam, often mutilating a bunch of cards in the process. Trying to recreate those cards was a chore.

At the end of each day, we'd toss out a bin full of the tiny paper bits resulting from holes being punched. It wasn't until the notorious 2000 US Presidential election; wherein the result hung on the outcome of the Florida absentee vote tally that I learned that those little hole pieces had a name as "Hanging chad" forever became a part of the American political lexicon.

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We always called them "discarded bits".

I first saw an IBM PC at university in 1983, I did BASIC and Turbo Pascal programming on that platform. Then it was assembly and machine language on a Terak PDP-11 based machine, 8” floppy drives. PL/1, Cobol, and JCL on the IBM 370, and (some forgotten language) running on VMS on a DEC MicroVAX. Somewhere along the way I had some exposure to Commodore 64 and 128, and the Timex Sinclair.

Then it was out into the workforce with shiny new BS degree in Computer Science. I ended up at at a midsize company in Omaha, Nebraska, ACI of Base24 fame. That was doing software development in TACL, TAL, and C on the Tandem NonStop.

The first PC I bought was circa 1991 I think. It was an Acros (Acer) 386 running Windows 3.0 (?). It had a 4800 baud modem; I spent a lot of time on Prodigy and some local BBS..

About 1995 we started carrying laptops for work, at about the same time I officially moved from software development to Implementation and Support. Those were Windows 3.11, and I think I have hit everything along the way, Windows-wise, with the exception of ME.