Replies

You Dad was right about the 386 based IBM (and HP) being strongly preferred for science and engineering. No none nada trivial technical software for Mac around 1990. In the early to mid 1980s we often wrote our own software and in my case using HP Basic (very efficient) and Fortran (could handle most any thing. In the mid- 80s, I was running process models on a then state of the art IBM tower using compiled Fortran that often took 60 min to run one case. Data input was a DOS text file created with Edlin. Output was a table of numbers. This table was manually typed into a Quattro Pro spreadsheet for additional crunching to give info needed to determine direction of the next case. Multiple cycles of this built up to determining optimum conditions used for running a field trial for a new product using one train at a multitrain petrochemical unit.

Late 80s laptops hit the tech world and I changed hats to the process control field. Went through a lot of laptops using them in the field but they were a game changer. Used it for data collection (raw data via RS232 to the computer was several hundred numbers per cycle and a 3.5 floppy disk would hold 4 to 8 hours of run time. Back in the office, would import all the data into Quattro Pro, graph things, pull out the key data groups then run statistics on them using the built in stats of the spreadsheet. Oh, the reason I went through a laptop every 12 months or so was abuse. Seems that they just don’t like being left outside in a production plant sitting on a concrete block with a tarp thrown over it for protection. I had fun with repair geeks over this and soon gave up on thinking about repair. Why spend $500 or more for repair for a computer that was already out of date after 1 year. Toss it and keep on truckin’!