Commentary 34 SIGDOC Reminiscences 1981-88 Diana Patterson Former SIGDOC Chair dpatterson@mtroyal.ab.ca Back in these ancient days SIGDOC was a very relaxed organisation full of personal opinion, and hominess. To give you the flavour of that far off time, I shall present this report as a personal anecdote rather than a proper technical document. Please forgive me, those of you with more formal and well balanced notions of history. State of Computing Before Windows The world was full of computers that required the user to know where a file was possibly to know where the deck of cards was that contain the program and its data. The following cartoon from June, 1985, right in the middle of our period will show you what software and operating systems were available not that Windows wasn t available then, but it was small change in those days. If you get all the jokes on the spine, you are very old! For most of that period, we had very few screens where you filled in the blanks when we did fill in such things, they were mostly forms with orange letters on a black screen. Green screens were the norm, but the ISO
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