Laws of Computing

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PC World Magazine (USA) gives thirty-five of these, among the truest being:

Fix a computer for a friend or family member, and you’ll be [their] tech support for life.

Only some of the other laws are interesting…

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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Fix a computer for a friend or family member, and you’ll be [their] tech support for life.

Too, too true!

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PC World Magazine (USA) gives thirty-five of these, among the truest being:

Fix a computer for a friend or family member, and you’ll be [their] tech support for life.

Only some of the other laws are interesting…

Personally I like my friend’s “Microsoft KISS” Principle ….

Keep Installing Software Silly – Microsoft software that is

BTB-He works for Microsoft – part time.

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PC World Magazine (USA) gives thirty-five of these, among the truest being:

Fix a computer for a friend or family member, and you’ll be [their] tech support for life.

Only some of the other laws are interesting…

TRUE, TRUE, TRUE, TRUE.

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I especially like and can relate to this one:
[indent]Law 4: Show any handy IT skills at work, and your company’s IT department will start referring difficult coworkers to you.[/indent]Way, way back in my IBM days (late 70s and early 80s, I was something of the reigning spreadsheet guru at our local facility. I had begun my personal computer jaunt when I had my Apple IIc and then into the IBM PC era. Went from early Visicalc to Multiplan to Lotus 1-2-3. I got pretty good at it, especially writing macros and “capturing” data from the company’s mainframes. I used to get so many people sent to my office for help that my manager started complaining about it.(Never did do anything with Excel at that time.)

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I especially like and can relate to this one:
[indent]Law 4: Show any handy IT skills at work, and your company’s IT department will start referring difficult coworkers to you.[/indent]Way, way back in my IBM days (late 70s and early 80s, I was something of the reigning spreadsheet guru at our local facility. I had begun my personal computer jaunt when I had my Apple IIc and then into the IBM PC era. Went from early Visicalc to Multiplan to Lotus 1-2-3. I got pretty good at it, especially writing macros and “capturing” data from the company’s mainframes. I used to get so many people sent to my office for help that my manager started complaining about it.(Never did do anything with Excel at that time.)

Hi Al

Did you not have SuperCalc on your Apple II?

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Did you not have SuperCalc on your Apple II?

Not that I ever remember but it’s been a long time ago. I think my first was the Visicalc I mentioned. If it came bundled with the Apple I may not have been aware of it. Back in the floppy disk days I could have had something I never knew to try.

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Not that I ever remember but it’s been a long time ago. I think my first was the Visicalc I mentioned. If it came bundled with the Apple I may not have been aware of it. Back in the floppy disk days I could have had something I never knew to try.

Were those 8-inch floppies?

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Were those 8-inch floppies?

No, they were 5 1/4 inch drives. If you are interested here is an interesting history of Woz’s invention!

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No, they were 5 1/4 inch drives. If you are interested here is an interesting history of Woz’s invention!

Not only that, but I lied up above! I was doing some more digging and now remember that I had an Apple II+ and here is some stuff about it. I think I remember that my first “peripheral” purchase was the second floppy drive.
[indent]Apple II+
[/indent]

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Not that I ever remember but it’s been a long time ago. I think my first was the Visicalc I mentioned. If it came bundled with the Apple I may not have been aware of it. Back in the floppy disk days I could have had something I never knew to try.

IIRC SuperCalc did come out eventually for the Apple II, but it was some years later. Visicalc, otoh, came out originally for the Apple II and later for computers running DOS, whatever those were.

oops – great minds think alike and small ones …

You beat me by 3 minutes!

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Hi Al

Did you not have SuperCalc on your Apple II?

Oooo SuperCalc! I remember that one on PCs in the early 90s, loved it.

Ken

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Oooo SuperCalc! I remember that one on PCs in the early 90s, loved it.

Ken

Seems to me that it provided the engine to drive Lotus123

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Seems to me that it provided the engine to drive Lotus123

I can’t find anything that substantiates that, but did find that the three pioneers came in this order:
[indent]Visicalc in January 1979
SuperCalc in January 1980
Lotus 123 in January 1983
[/indent]I did see something that jogged my memory a little bit more however. SuperCalc allegedly was the first spreadsheet to have “three dimensional” spreadsheets. I DO think I tried it once when it was sold to Computer Associates but decided to stick to Lotus.

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Before PCs were becoming very common I did some consulting using a mainframe spreadsheet-like product called Foresight (or was it Foresite?).

It didn’t have the wysiwig of spreadsheets now but it had some very powerful features for its day. What I picked up from that enabled me to use spreadsheets in ways which surprised many of my colleagues just because of the vision of things which could be done.

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I can also relate to this one:
[indent]Law 4: Show any handy IT skills at work, and your company’s IT department will start referring difficult coworkers to you.[/indent]
In ’75 or so, I built a SWTPc 6800 home system. About a year later we were getting IBM’s with Windows 3.1 at work. Because I had a “home PC”, fellow workers were coming to me with all sorts of questions. There were no IT departments in those days. We were given the PC’s w/documentation and that was it.
I still have that 6800 system which still works. I also have that first work IBM PC which still works.

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I especially like and can relate to this one:
[indent]Law 4: Show any handy IT skills at work, and your company’s IT department will start referring difficult coworkers to you.[/indent]

But there’s a “fine print” rider clause that goes with that…
[indent] … but you’ll never be offered a pay rise commensurate with your newly aquired tonnage of duties.[/indent]

Alan

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We used Appleworks on our computing suite of 2 Apple ]http://windowssecrets.com/forums/images/smilies/flee.gif[/img] – and my brownie point (but no money…) when I found a place to convert all our apple discs to DOS format. Had to save all the word processed files as ASCII first though. The spreadsheets were toast….

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