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Re: spreadsheet ergonomics

Steve Carroll
SubjectRe: spreadsheet ergonomics
FromSteve Carroll
Date04/13/2017 00:29 (04/12/2017 15:29)
Message-ID<457e4e33-b1c5-4b47-a48e-fc45eed57134@googlegroups.com>
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Newsgroupscomp.os.linux.advocacy
FollowsMarek Novotny

On Wednesday, April 12, 2017 at 4:23:35 PM UTC-6, Marek Novotny wrote:

Marek Novotny
On 2017-04-12, Silver-Tongued Heel <sl@im.er>wrote:

Silver-Tongued Heel
On 2017-04-12 1:42 PM, Steve Carroll wrote:

Steve Carroll
On Wednesday, April 12, 2017 at 10:24:46 AM UTC-6, DFS wrote:

DFS
On 4/12/2017 10:10 AM, Melzzzzz wrote:

Melzzzzz
On 2017-04-12, DFS <nospam@dfs.com>wrote:

DFS
On 4/12/2017 8:33 AM, Melzzzzz wrote:

Melzzzzz
then again, not until 1994 I really start to enjoy computers...

DFS
Why not? I enjoyed DOS programs from '85 to '91 or so: Norton Commander, Javelin, Lotus 1-2-3, dBase, Paradox, Norton Utilities...

And then a little later came Doom and Heretic and Hexen.

Melzzzzz
I couldn't afford PC in that time...

DFS
Yeah, they were expensive back then. I think my Dad gave me my first PC (an 8086).

Today USD 1500 will get you a nice PC. That's 174758 RSD. Will that buy you a good system over there? Is that expensive relative to rent and food and gasoline?

Steve Carroll
I worked with PCs but I wanted an Apple. They were initially too expensive so I waited until the IIe came down to around $1500.00, which was still a bit of $$ back then.

Silver-Tongued Heel
What year was this? I still have trouble accepting that people actually got work done on those 8-bit machines. They seemed fairly useless.

Marek Novotny
You could learn to program in basic back then. On the Commodore 64 basic was the command line. VisaCalc was born on the 8 bit Apple ][ which as you know is the start of the spreadsheet as we know it today. You could type up pages of text and when it was perfect, you print it just once, rather than typing pages of text and hoping you don't screw up somewhere and have to do it again. And that's just the basic tasks. We used to have human computers that would calculate by hand. Even an 8-bit computer is vastly superior to those days.

VisiCalc, now there's an oldie! Remember those 5 1/4" floppy drives Apple made (I had 2)? Spitting, sputtering, lurching... and that's when they were working properly ;)