Introduction to Microsoft Excel - 1990

My grandfather was pretty cutting edge, I remember him showing me Excel about that time. I remember his words, "it's powerful", and I was like, that's neat, but I don't have any math to do right now. I was 13.

I still have at least one of the original boxes and disks in my PC graveyard.

Lmfao

I used to think the boxes for excel and word were so cool looking.

Word was a massive improvement over Word Perfect.

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Don't tell the secretaries that. Ours still bitches about the switch when she can't figure something out.

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100% true story. my best friend in high school talked his dad into buying a $10,000 IBM back in 1982 or so complete with the legendary clickity-clack keyboard. his dad checked cotton for boll weavels for a living. not sure how he talked him into that one.


anyway, they sold him wordstar with it and i went over to his house and wrote my entire term paper on it while he had his mom, who was a secretary bang his out on an IBM selectric typewriter with the little round ball.

i learned wordstar on the fly as i fumbled through writing my paper and learning how to use the command prompt to edit.

it was truly a test of john henry vs a machine in that our papers had to be PERFECT and so if she made a mistake she would have to retype the whole page.


in the end, i almost got fricked because i was printing this on the okidata dot-matrix printer that came with the computer only to find out the teacher would NOT accept dot matrix or perforated printer paper.

so in a mad panic i looked up everything there was to know about the okidata and found an obscure "correspondence quality" setting in the printer driver that would send the dot matrix head back over the same line of text in a slight offset to 'blend' the dot matrix text....this turned the printed dot matrix crap into a passable 'typewriter' font.

sure enough, i turned that setting on, printed it out, took it home and with the slightest touch of a damp rag proceeeded to 'polish' the 4 sides of each piece of paper to remove the evidence of the dotted tear lines.

believe it or not, teacher accepted it and i got an A and he got a B+ because of a couple of typos and incorrect typewriter formatting.

to my knowledge that computer was never used again and i claimed title of COMPUTER WINS over his mom's work..and his mom was a BADASS on the typewriter.

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The 80s and 90s were probably the best decades in American History on almost every level for a myriad of reasons. That video embodies many of them.

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if you haven't already; watch the series 'halt and catch fire' which really captures the 80s & early 90s computer scene very well.