[gmku]

I first started using "personal computers" at work in the late 1980s when I was an officer in the air force. They were terrible. You had an IT guy down the hall who literally had to come to your office every other day to fix some problem or other, and only he knew how to do anything. It was like some secret--if he told you how to do it, he'd have to kill you or something. Weird.

Black screens and green letters. No graphics. About all you could do was word processing. No connectivity. It was a big deal in 1990 when we installed "electronic messaging" between our offices--in the same building. There was some talk of connecting to other places on base, but that was really expensive and hard to do.