In the early 1980s, I worked for a company that had the first two Amdahls that rolled off the assembly line (mainframes). But I did corporate forecasting on my Apple, using Visicalc. The code for for mainframe took an overnight run, with more than 5 minutes compute time (at $200 per minute). On the Apple, it ran for free. Either way took the same amount of my time. Should have billed the company $200 per minute, but that was job security.
After her first corporation was merged with the next corporation and the first corporation’s mainframes were trashed, IT management threw a hot potato into her lap in the expectation it would be an excuse to discredit the personal computer transition project in the financial accounting department for which my wife had been made responsible. Much to their dumbfoundment, she solved the problem and reduced the deliverable from the previous thirty day reporting cycle to two days.
The task was to compute the latest pricing schedules for crude oil production lots. The application software used was Sorcim/CA Supercalc. The platform was an IBM PC-XT. The schedules were entirely too large to fit in the limited memory space of the IBM PC-XT, which is why the IT Dept. thought they were going to watch as the inevitable failure occurred. Instead, we studied the problem and came up with a way of breaking the schedules down into their smaller tables which easily fit into the available memory space. Then we learned how to use the macro language features to automatically load the spreadsheet tables in succession until the price schedules were computed, saved, and printed. The run took about 12 hours. With modificatons along the way to adapt to the later and faster computers and a changeover to Micosoft Excel, the runs were reduced to only 1 to 2 hours after seven years of use. The IT managers did not forgive or forget.