I worked as a maintenance electrician in IBM, Wigmore Street London for a time. We was offered the chance to buy computers for a really cheap price. I bought a PS/2 (I think, though might have been PS/1) 100Mb hard drive, 8 Mb Ram and floppy disk drive, Running windows 3.1 and came preloaded with Lotus Organizer, a filofax type software which was actually very good. I tried to install windows office later on, think it came on 8 floppy disks, which all but wiped out my hard drive, and was so slow as to be unusable. The computer might still be in the loft, built like a tank, it probably still works.
I drafted my first books on it as that was what I wanted it for, to write books. The first book I wrote on it was called ‘When the wood’s paths met’.
I also kept a very concise diary in Lotus organizer, alas, of course, when it was discontinued there was no way to transfer it, so I lost it all, especially after having to delete it eventually in a futile attempt to load Windows Office.
I never trusted the digital domain afterwards~ It was a continual upgrade, continually requiring updates, if software was a motorcar you’d condemn it, no one would constantly spend that amount of time updating. If I could have listed the amount of time and hours I’d spent trying to repair, restore, reconfigure things and charge IBM, Microsoft etc for my time, I should probably get/deserve everything free.
The much missed Lotus organizer
The Western Gate 
Leave a comment