Hi Folks,
I'm glad some of you are as old as me (if not even older)!
My first encounter with a 'pooter was at Dixons (for whom I worked at the time) when a Hungarian whiz kid installed the second photo-business 'pooter in the UK - he had already installed the first in Kodak. Dixons 'pooter was intended to reduce overheads by loosing a lot of stock control staff and reduce the usage of trees. (Stanley Kalms was very young, knew every member of his staff by their Christian names and I've a feeling he was a socialist.) Well, as we all now know, 'pooters don't make work forces smaller or save trees - far from it. However, this 'pooter took up the whole of one floor of Dixon House, comprised of floor to ceiling cabinets with tape drives, was in a dust free environment on a concrete floor floating on a rubber layer (Metallastic?) and was tended by a team of white coated, hatted and slippered persons of greater number than the stock control team! However, this 'pooter could do the weeks business in about an hour and was therefore largely unemployed whereas the white coats had to be kept busy - so young Kalms rented out time on his new toy!
Many many years later, a very specialist pro photo dealer ran their whole business on a PCW - which encouraged me to buy one for myself - PCW 8256 with green screen. Now of course the PCW was not a 'real' 'pooter, just an electronic typewriter where you could see your mistakes on screen before committing to paper. So, command line operation in CP/M - easy!!! However, the PCW run company was a competitor and the company that I worked for decided they (or at least the 'financial director') would emulate Dixons and install a mainframe machine - some Swedish company who also make cars and flying machines. This was like the Dixons machine intended for stock control and POS and was linked by landline to Kodak who was a major supplier so they could automatically top our stocks up. Naturally, this was expensive, and didn't reduce our overheads. What it did was to allow 14 digit product codes - and yes, 14 digit codes were used. As most brilliant sales persons are like doctors and can't write, they just couldn't cope with 'one roll of Kodachrome part #12354368700912 £5.98.' Prior to POS, £5.98 would have been rung up in the till, with POS, an invoice had to be written. The invoice set of five copies cost about £1.20 per set. A team had to be employed to check all sales invoices to correct product codes and descriptions and our 'human resources department' had to warn and eventually rid us of dyslexic sales persons. The said HRD discovered they could employ two young diploma'd persons for the same salary as one high flying sales bod and we were soon populated with diploma'd know nothings and without a quality sales force... Needless to say said company no longer exists! However, the local library who then conducted all ins and outs on an Acorn still is.
My PCW was up graded (by myself) to 512 - that's 512 kB of RAM. (I know machines prior to the PCW ran three apps on 64 Kb), from a single drive to a twin drive, eventually one 3 in and one of those new 720 kB 3.5 in things and lots of 'dongles' for mouse, scanner &c. Eventually, the Amstrad PC 512C replaced the PCW and this was initially a single drive 5.25 floppy drive machine running Locoscript Pro in a form of DOS which was also fitted with a 3.5 in floppy as drive B. Eventually, a 20 mB 'hard card' drive was fitted - so much power, so much space! What's the minimum space required today? Linux SuSe seems on a 'simple' installation to require close on 1 Gb of HDD space. I don't know what the minimum amount of RAM required is but it runs in 512 mB. The PC 512 still resides in my garage - must get it out and fire it up and see what happens! It was replaced by 386, 486, Pentiums et al, currently AMDs. Incidentally, I have a large quantity of 5.25 floppies to dispose of! And I still have Locoscript Pro on my desktop!
Now, is that progress?
Cheers,
BD.