Well, I just returned from a trip back in time - back to the Pre-Pentium days of computers - anyone remember that? A dear friend's mother, a beautiful woman in her late 70's I'd guess, had been using a computer that was her son's castaway to send email to all her friends, and something, no one is sure what, happened and it quit working - her son called AOL and they advised a new modem - problem is this is a Packard Bell 486 DX -upgraded piece by piece for years so that it now had a CD Drive - Zip Drive, and new hard drive, and an external modem that also somehow worked with the speakers - I guess PB had a proprietary sound card built in - but what ever,I was called in to try to make it work. I tried everything - an internal modem that fit in but wouldn't work, a new external modem - $59.00 fancy job that was downward compatible with everything but a TRS 80- still nothing.
So I packed all that up and brought it home, and dug out my box of REMAINS - you know the one I mean - that box with all the spare parts you kept when the first, second, fourth and fifth PC went bad and you had to replace something - I have been leapfrogging over computer advancements since 1981 -when my husband brought home the first Apple II+.
I was so fascinated by that Apple, I learned Visicalc in days - pretty soon I was doing my own spreadsheets to manage my interior design business. I even dreamed once of writing programs to do the accounting for design businesses, and I can remember having what-if conversations with fabric and wallpaper suppliers, dreaming of the day when you could have a whole sample catalog on a disk
I moved to PC's after drooling over the Apple Lisa 2 (the mother of the Macintosh machine) which was way too pricey for me. I almost had a love affair with the Lisa though. I know the Apple salesmen got tired of me coming in and stroking the case of that sleek dream-machine.
The first PC I had was a Leading Edge. I remember seeing an ad for it in a very early USA today - What a concept that was at the time - a paper that appealed to everyone - in Color! You couldn't even buy it except in Newstands at first, but somehow I was a regular reader back then. There was an ad for a Leading Edge, and I loved that computer - it was in some ways ahead of it's time -(I know this even though I can't remember how at the moment) but it was a model M, which was the kiss of death when it came to upgrading. Seems a model D was okay, but a model M was not - Or was it the other way around? Anyway, it served it's purpose for me for many years. I think I paid $1400 for it brand new, and that was a deal back then. We're talking before Windows - this was an 8088 - and I remember the printer I had to go with it - the memory chips on that IDS printer were huge! Tractor feed dot matrix - A Daisy Wheel with letters on it -Imagine this, if you can.
See, I've always been this half breed - half artistic and half high tech - and being female to boot made me a freak in the working world - I remember deciding that maybe I could get a job selling computers after my divorce and the demise of my design business.- I interviewed for a job with Monroe Business Systems and you know what they told me? We couldn't be sure you wouldn't want to have more children -( I already had two )- and besides you're over qualified. I ended up with a job selling cars - made damn good money too - enough to buy another computer when I finally learned that the LE model M (or D) wasn't upgradeable -
Somehow there is this big blur in my memory about here - I moved to Atlanta, had six jobs in three years, and one of them was as a salesman in what would later become CompUSA - they called it Soft Warehouse back then. That's when I learned about Packard Bells - ughh - and I learned a ton of other stuff also - like sexual harrassment on the job - (the warehouse was a favorite place for that shenanigans) and how "warehouse" type companies treat the merchandise like it was canned groceries - no kidding, I remember seeing a stack of monitors fall to the floor - they just picked them up and restacked them...That's what the service department was for anyway...
That's when my big break came and I got a job as a factory rep for a company out of Dallas called Intelligence Technology Company. (Stop laughing!)These guys had a laptop - a 286 - that weighted 28 pounds and had a cellular phone built in - it was all the rage in the corporate sector - (Stop, I said!) -for about six months - long enough for me to show it to every geek with a good idea who wanted to try it out - and in the end I sold two.
They started out at $7000 and the two I sold were $1400 apiece. (So in other words in six months I made about $600.) The company had tons of them - they had gone through all sorts of secretive negotiations with some company in Taiwan or someplace and they had had the thing built there and assembled in Dallas - and by the time it hit the market the laptop price and weight were going down and ours was an albatross very quickly - I have no idea what they did with the 400 or so that they had left.
I met some interesting people from this experience, and one of them was working on a software concept for a incident management software package - he wanted to be able to use this software in emergencies like fires and earthquakes to manage incident command - there was a fascinating group of public works, fire, police and FEMA/hazmat types working with this project, and I joined in for a while - It would be another one of those things which was ahead of its time - certainly in todays environment it would have been snatched up immediately, but at the time only a few public works types could see the need. I eventually pulled out of that grand scheme - and moved in over my sister's garage. I was absolutely broke, divorced and had had to let my two children go live with their aunt and uncle. It didn't seem like I could find myself anywhere during those times. It was 1990-91.
That's when I went back to school the first time - to Georgia State - at first I wanted to major in Computer Information Systems - imagine an artist in that group! Then I switched to Business and finally transferred to Shorter College - where they had a more real world curriculum for adults - by then I was working for a nuclear power industry organization and the computer I had was a home built one - as I recall - I do remember having Windows on it - and I bought it with a loan from my company - During the five years I worked for them I learned every software package Microsoft made, and got pretty good at building databases in MS Access. But my real hot button at that time was ACT! - I could do anything with that package - I even used it to manage the facilities department where I was a secretary.
Five years rolled around, I finished my degree, got vested and blasted out of there like I was shot out of a cannon. The internet had by then arrived, and I was on fire to create my own website. I had started collecting antiques and I created a site called Antique Connexions, which was focused on art and antiques in the south. I thought I could create websites, take photos and update them, bill and collect and manage all of it for hundreds of towns and thousands of antique businesses. I couldn't even get out of Marietta, GA. I kept struggling along until, down to my last dime, having sold all of my collectibles I rented a truck and moved back to Alabama. To be an artist. Period. End of Story. ;-)
Copyright 2003 Susan W. Hales
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