ran a one man business off an apple IIe
with 2 shoebox floppy discs
upgraded memory to 128k (a joke today)
and used micro soft multiplan (spreadsheet)(that was before they changed the name to microsoft)
and word...
with my proprietary voyage estimate program i could run voyage estimates 10x faster than manually and could bid more jobs... I beat out Lykes line and Farrel Line for a big contract. Major us carriers at teh time...
the computer enabled me to get rid of the telex machine i was renting from western union (no more tape and chads all over). and i could send telexes from it via western union interface
the setup cost me $2500 and the telex was rented for $125/month (savings). that computer and a sts brick cellphone enabled me to compete with companies and my first contract was moving camp housing to the middle east as part of the camp david peace accord... i still have the IIe and the phone...oh an i had an answering machine with remote access.. thus i could be out selling and still answer calls to the office.. technology
128K was more than enough back then though, just because the operating systems were text-based and lean. Those floppies, were they 5.25”? Imagine booting an operating system off a 140K drive nowadays.
Even later on, as Bill “640K DOS Limit” Gates said in interview many years ago, the 128K original Mac with a 400K floppy and no hard drive was not a problem, programmers needed more discipline.
Multiplan was the first spreadsheet I used in a work setting (but on a mini- system) and I always liked it. By that time Lotus 123 was completely dominant in the MS market, and VisiCalc (the very first spreadsheet) had fallen off the face of the Earth.
Within ten years Excel was the only thing anyone seemed to be using, and Lotus, Borland, and nearly every other former software giant had either been swallowed whole or had just gone out of biz.