IBM finally stirred, having made a monopoly living by supplying rapidly becomong obsolete mainframes, and brought out an underpowered, un-innovative & very expensive 'Personal Computer'. Meanwhile small manufacturers ran rings round them with innovative designs like the Apple.
We experimented very successfully for several years with the WIMP interface of windows icons & mouse control, while IBM was still DOS command line based. The Atari ST gave us excellent support, & was also bought by many as a home machine.
It was also the first supplied with 3 1/2inch floppy as standard- up to then we had been using standard cassette tape as storage.
Paul Wickham & James Williams made interesting use of the machines in English. Individual mathematicians like Andrew Exton did mathematics Sixth Form Projects on them. KG & Junor Boys & Girls were doing lots with people like Roger Craddock, Sarah Walker, Val Courts, Mary Allen et al.
The Office now had calculators printing to paper rolls and were sending some work to computer bureaux. Printers were still slow & noisy dot matrix impact types, and we 'cut & pasted' for real with scissors & glue then photocopied the results until the Atari made full dtp easy with WYSIWYG. IBM software was nowhere near as far developed nor as cheap.
© Taunton School IT Dep't.