Got a $13,000 microcomputer in a corner of my studio. Haven't touched it this century, but it worked the last time I turned it on. I think it's probably from around a 1978 or so.
I had a project with Shell, designing, building and installing power station real-time control system for a new facility. Brown & Root was construction. B&R had a cost-plus contract on it, and had frequent meetings with Shell and we were part of those. BR always brought ten or fifteen engineers to the meetings, getting' that 10% on the plus.
One meeting, at B&R, the lead guy for Shell had a traffic problem, so we all got to sit around in a big space, waiting. Off in one corner was an absolutely drop-dead gorgeous blonde at a desk with a computer terminal on it. She would type for about thirty seconds, hit an ENTER key, pick up a book and read for about five minutes. The terminal would beep, she'd put down her book, look at a printout on her desk, turn to the terminal, type for about thirty seconds... rinse, repeat...
I went over to see what she was doing. Fair game, because the whole office was dedicated to that project, so... The printout was the data defining the analog control instrumentation – this thing had like 16,000 analog instruments, some just data, some just controls, and some both. It took six tab cards for each one of those – 480 characters. There were also another 8,000 switches, which were simple on/off things that could be turned on, turned off, or interrogated to see whether they were on or off. They only took three tab cards. So, yeah, lots of pages in the printout.
She said they were using the “big computer” in time-share mode, and they got a slice about every five minutes. She was correcting individual tab cards that had changes noted on the printout. Needless to say, a lot of those corrections were from my group... and now I knew why it was taking so goddamned long for B&R to get those corrections into the system.
When the Shell guy arrived and we got the meeting started, I got to bring up what we just saw. B&R said they weren't happy either, but they had orders to use their “big computer” and no outside services. Could they rent equipment? Yes, yes they could. We settled on $5,000 a month for the balance of the project (about nine more months).
I bought the latest and greatest CP/M microcomputer from CroMemCo, a snappy little z-100 based thing, with not one, but two, TWO 8-inch floppy drives (a full megabyte each). Got a copy of dBase II – total hardware and software, around $14,000. Took about three hours to write a little data entry, maintenance, and backup program in dBase II, a day to break up the data into groups small enough to fit on a disk. Took it to the B&R office, and the blonde took about all of thirty seconds to figure out how to use it. Showed the B&R Systems Programmers how to copy to and from the mainframe, they worked close to a week to create a Procedure to update from floppies to their big computer and back (this was in the days when the computers were still the bailiwick of the Accounting Department and everything had to be specified completely and approved by Managers before they could write a line of code).
Since it was only “rented”, I took it back when they were done with it.
I could probably let it go, cheap...