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The Victor 9000 My first paid computer-related job was the editing and hard copy production of an FAA-compliant operations manual for Aero Union Corporation of Chico California, in 1981. We used a Victor 9000 desktop computer running Wordstar under the CP/M 86 operating system. It worked very well, and we accomplished much in a short time.
- In 1983 the engineering drafting tables were set aside and replaced with NEC computers running AutoCAD version 2.38 (as I recall... version 2.5 was a big deal when it came out). It didn't take long for us to figure out that disk file management, and file revision control were now a big deal.
Iomega Bernoulli Box Dual 8.25" Disk Drive So I wrote a set of MS-DOS batch files that provided a way to "check-in" and "check-out" drawing files from our central Bernoulli Disk drive. This discipline imposed a set of rules by which we all had to abide. It really wasn't much different from manual drafting, except that the possibility now existed that two people could end up working on the same drawing simultaneously... so something had to be done to prevent that.
Back in those days, PLM still meant "Potatoes, Lima beans, and Maize." But the seeds of Document Control and Process Management had been planted deep in my brain. It's a science I was drawn to, for some twisted reason. I just have a thing for categories, taxonomies, abstractions, and information storage, retrieval, and efficient use. It drives me crazy to see things done haphazardly or in a random fashion.