Late summer 1987, when I took my present gig as a one-year temporary assignment. At that time my extremely conservative employer (doing business from the same San Francisco city block since the latter 1850s) had at most a couple of dozen terminals in the building talking to our distant mainframes, themselves of paleolithic provenance. The first PCs didn't arrive in the building until a couple of years after that. Since then I've gone through a Mac II, a pair of 8100s, a B&W G3 (still my main production machine, although starting to falter as it approaches its sixth birthday) and a graphite G4 (for low-end video editing and sundry OS X-specific applications). All of these have been, so to say, "off the grid" to the unspeakable relief of our long-suffering LAN Guy, and when it is necessary to exchange files with the generic network Dell (running NT[!]—I did mention that the employer is institutionally prone not to put itself at the cutting edge?) I do so via Sneakernetted Zip disks.

Sorry, what was the question again?

cordially,