December, 1989 I took a job with Case as an Area Service Manager. They handed me a Toshiba laptop (286, with a 40mb hard drive) and a stack of program manuals. Lotus 123, Word Perfect and Harvard Graphics if I recall correctly. Anyway, they said I should use it in my job.

I had to ask someone how to turn it on. I swore that would never happen again, and I dove in. I read the manuals, I purchased books and magazines. I struggled over my first spreadsheet. I spent many an hour with that thing on my lap watching football, or baseball, or whatever and trying to implement some function I had read about. I opened Word Perfect to that blue screen and almost nothing else on it and wondered what to do with that. I got familiar with the DOS command line, and started learning ways to customize things.

After a few months, we had some sort of meeting that brought all the reps to the head office. It quickly became apparent that I was one of the few who had any clue how to use the thing to add value to the job I was doing. The only application most used was to dial into Racine and access Casenet (their text only internal email and messaging system) and a few other inventory related reports. Unfortunately, Case's fortunes turned backwards and they had to cut their field staff. I was gone in the second wave.

It was a challenge to learn all this on my own, but I'm very glad I did. That was the start of my serious computing, but I'd been previously exposed to punch cards in one highschool class, and was exposed to loading games (pacman?) from a cassette tape at a friend's place.