In 97 ?, I bought one of the first retail CD writers. $700 with a discount!!! It wrote at a staggering 2x speed.
A friend, Bruce Gooding, worked for Fay Richwhite during the 1987 America's Cup campaign and when he left, they sold him, cheap, one of their word processors. $7000. He took it to the Auckland Star and all the journos walked out (under Union advice) until he had taken it back home. They were still using Imperial typewriters, clattering away. The Unions held the advance of new technology into the media at bay for decades. Bruce's machine had two 5.5 inch floppy discs, one with the program and the other was data storage - and it was the size of one of those oil colunm radiators. It ran an operating system called something like Rainbow 80/20 (Pre-dos) When i worked at Sea Spray magazine each issue would consume about 5 grand's worth of mylar, which was all hand assembled in sheets about 2m x 1.5m and became a large negative through which the printing plates were exposed (exactly the same process as photos used to be). After every issue the mylars had to be hand stripped to retrieve all the advertising film (four A4 sheets per ad). When technology went computer direct to plate, it saved publishers a massive amount, but the added cost of those two decades pretty much crippled the publishing industry because many went to the wall and the others (in NZ) were in such a poor state that the Australians came in, bought the lot and have cut the guts out of them. Computers have been at the forefront of the industry in which I work and they have made a massive difference in terms of simplifying the whole process and reducing costs. Scans that used to cost us hundreds of dollars each (in a magazine that might need a hundred of them) can now be done on a machine that costs a few hundred bucks and will last 5 years (generally superseded by better technology rather than wearing out, too). I could go on about this but, will leave this here for now.
I was working in London in the late 80's early 90's as a mobile Air Conditioning Service Tech doing retail shops, Offices, Hotels and London Underground. I went to the office in Southend which is about an hour out of London for he interview, then picked up the car, a Citroen B something diesel and and when I left a year later went back to the office and dropped off the car. All other communication was via post, pager and phone. They would mail me the weeks work and service work was done via the pager.....stop the car and find a phone....card one if your lucky.Only the Supervisors had moblies or Yuppy phones as they were called... First PC's I saw were Building Management Systems in about 1992, then when I came back to NZ I got more into them and computers and by 1996 I bought my first one a Pentium 1 for $1600.00, in 97 got a mobile on Bell South privately as the company used chunky walky talkies......hardly used the phone as it cost too much to call during business hours. In 1998 got a job with Honeywell....car, laptop, internet, email address, business cards, Nokia 5110...I'd arrived......interesting decade.
