zlacker

>>sohkam+(OP)
That's an early version of the system. I've seen pictures of a later version, which was an IBM 3270 display with a phone handset, but no keyboard. The idea was that the executive would pick up the phone and be connected to someone in a call center who would then do spreadsheet-type operations for them. Don't know if that was deployed much.

>>Animat+V4
Very prescient! That's pretty much how my execs work with MS Teams and my Excel models - they call me and I manipulate them on the screen for them :-D

>>snthpy+ra
In the early 1990s, I was working on GUI email software. Not much different than the email software at university, just the pixel resolution was higher with GUI.

The dev team went out "into the field" to help roll out the software to the company. This also allowed us to see how others used the software.

At the end of the day, one of the devs reported back that one personal assistant would maximize the email app's window (back when 17" CRT monitors were large) and after each email was processed, she'd print out the email and file it the appropriate spot in a filing cabinet.

All the devs were, "But... But... she can just file the email in an email folder in the program. Why does she need hardcopy? Email was supposed to save trees!"

>>canuck+Qh
I once met with NEC who was wanted to hire some consultants to help them on your cloud journey. They wanted to become a cloud managed services and hosting provider - but had never done anything in 'cloud' before, this seemed odd to me and as I dug deeper things got weirder.

They demanded that their 'engineers' must be able to build out and manage both their own and their managed infra on AWS but never write any code - in fact they thought automation was outright dangerous, they said their engineers would never write any terraform, cloud formation or similar and that they wanted to become a MSP of cloud services preferring to write everything down in runbooks... and print those runbooks out.

The managers would turn up to meetings with huge stacks of paper that were just AWS documentation converted to pdf and printed.

We refused to work with them and essentially walked out. I'm sure this is something that someone like an Accenture or Deloitte would and probably did jump on.

This was 2019.