“Miss Goldstein, please take a memo for me…. Colleagues, it has come to my attention that we are spending too much money on our secretarial staff, particularly as in the creation of memos. We’re going to need to limit the number of memos we can each send…”

Can you imagine living back then? Having someone literally type up your (non-e)mail for you?

My mother was a executive secretary. She was an amazing writer. But when she wrote, she spoke for someone else.

...

“Who ever wrote this software had me in mind when they wrote it, and they must love me.”

I first had this experience programming on CPM way too long ago. At that point in time you had a couple of choices in trying to write programs that fit into 64K of RAM (K, not Meg, not G); you could write in assembly language, or your could write in Basic or you could write using Microsoft’s crappy, expensive Fortran or C Compiler.

Basic sucked. Compiled programs were big and slow. C...