Columnist Caleb Chamberlain recalls the days of the IBM-compatible computer, massive calculators, and a starkly different time in U.S. manufacturing. Things have changed—and mostly for the better.
When I was 12, my grandma gave me an old 486 IBM-compatible computer. It ran a text-only operating system called DOS, used 5.25-in. floppy disks, and had a green-tinted monochrome display. I don’t recall how much memory or disk space it had, but I still remember the faint buzz of the monitor and the clicking and whirring of the floppy drives. I learned how to program on that machine, writing text adventures in a programming language called BASIC.
As I recall, my grandparents originally purchased the computer to help with my grandpa’s insurance business. It originally cost something like $2,000, equivalent to over $5,000 in 2024. It’s wild to think that such an archaic machine (by today’s standards) cost so much, but it would have been worth it for the “killer app” of early computing: spreadsheets. It probably ran Lotus 1-2-3, an old DOS-based spreadsheet tool that was last updated more than two decades ago.
As clunky as that old software was, it would have transformed the way my grandparents worked. Before personal computers became common in the ʾ80s and ʾ90s, paper ledgers were the name of the game. Bookkeeping was kept in actual books (crazy, I know). And financial projections would have been created laboriously over weeks or months, if at all. In 2024, it’s hard to imagine what it would have been like to run a business without digital spreadsheets. That can be said of many things, and fabrication technology is no exception.
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