We were tonight a small group: John L., Dean, Alex, Cathy, Don, Ferne and myself, Tomek. Conversation tonight began with the question, where do our (fictional) stories come from? We had a (poor quality) Tina Turner impersonator, some Simpsons episodes were referenced, then we got into a deep conversation about the evolution of technology, beginning with some historic local ones, including Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel, which somehow got us onto dementia and virtual reality, which looped us back to how we generate story lines. One of our number complained about the lack of female runners on TV, but then redeemed himself by telling a hysterical story about coming home from his wedding to an empty workplace. Ask him sometime. We relived Monday night’s exploits and stories, including the flying pig, Irish versus Scottish whiskies, and landed us at Lonnie Donegan again. A few of our regulars were missed tonight, but as always, a good time was had by all.
The Corner Booth, Writing-(noun & verb)
And Lonnie Donegan again? More skiffle? Dotage impends…
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The name of the original spreadsheet application which so adroitly escaped me last night was VisiCalc, by Dan Bricklin. It was followed into the market by SuperCalc and a few others until Mitch’s “1-2-3” blew them all away like so many motes in the wind. Lotus owned the spreadsheet market for a number of years, until Microsoft decided Excel should own that market. The secret to 1-2-3’s success was its implementation of a simple, rememberable command system that accessed and controlled the command menus without actually trudging through the menu structure. What killed it was Lotus’s inability to wrap its head around how to use memory above 640K (Who would ever NEED a whole megabyte of RAM, fer cry-eye?)
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