 Picture this. It
was 1986. Very few people had ever even had their hands on a computer. Most
were intimidated. But not DAKonians. We put together a complete solution.
Let me explain.
1. The Visual Commuter
8088 4.77MHz computer really was superbly built. It was so solid and portable
you almost drop it. But, don't forget it was 1986. It only had two 5" floppy
360K drives 128-512K of RAM, AND NO HARD DRIVE was yet available for desktop
computers. Wow, have we come a long way.
2. I had my first
experience with programming. To make this computer really easy to use, we
wrote a super simple word processing program. Just put in the disk and type.
My claim to fame was that all the commands would pop-up on-screen for ease
of use. But the super big news of the day was that you could print out your
work, revise it and then make your corrections on-screen. Wow, that was
a breakthrough which for its day put us miles ahead of any other office
typewriter solution.
3. We added a Professional
package of software for real word processing and accounting.
4. We added 10 5"
floppy disks because they were hard to find in stores.
5. We went to Magnavox
and bought these amber monitors so that you could see what you were doing.
Visual had a built-in video card, but hadn't considered a monitor.
6. I went to Silver
Reed and added a daisy wheel printer. Remember them? They had a spinning
wheel with all the letters on it that was a competition to the IBM Selectric
typewriter. It produced perfect letters just like a typewriter and frankly
even today's laser printers cant surpass it in print quality. (Speed is
a whole other issue.) BTW, we even included the cables so that this was
a 100% out of the box solution.
7. One more thing.
Although I don't see it in this ad, we developed a graphics program that
used the period on the daisy wheel printer to create pictures and graphs.
Imagine that, using the period much like a dot matrix printer to create
images. It admittedly took forever, but it did a credible job. I guess necessity
really is the mother of invention.
8. Oh yes, and as
you read my story, you'll see that I really do outline "the bad points"
too.
That's all part
of the DAKonian experience. So, that's it. I just wanted to give you an
idea of what you can expect DAK 2000 to add to a product to make sure that
if it's new technology it's ready for you to use. We do the extra work so
it's easy for you to harness the latest technologies And I've been doing
it this way for over 30 years. |
