[speaker001:] personal computers are are nice I guess if you can afford them the the problem if you happen to use one at work is you tend to get spoiled with the uh maybe a higher grade one maybe the the economics and the payback of having one at a business is a little bit better than having one at home and I've read a few articles that uh where people have nice uh three eighty six machines and nice graphics and the nice software packages and then when they come home they they just can't stand to come down to the X T level and and don't like the the slowness or the in some cases not even having a hard drive and that's pretty much where I fall into I use a a relatively nice array of machines at work for scientific purposes and I have a variety of of uh speeds and complexity of machines depending upon the instrument that it's controlling and then I have one that I do just general purpose work on and then for the house I don't have anything uh not that I wouldn't want one but I would probably not be satisfied with anything less than a really nice one and that's that's a quite an expense and then all the software tends to be uh commercial grade it's all where I guess you know to get something like WordPerfect you're looking at uh five hundred dollars worth or so and some of the accounting packages or the the nicer spreadsheets are somewhat expensive and I don't know it's it's quite a a expense or a luxury for the house I guess and there's not a whole lot I would do other than some word processing I I got a a number of things that I could could be doing on a PC instead of here instead of doing them at the home at work they're for the house but I do them on occasion at work and it's nice to uh it would be nice to have one I guess what do you think
[speaker002:] I share your your uh sense when you change job to work or job to home uh the way your your image of the machine changes I tend to do slightly different things at home than I do at work um I use One Two Three a lot the Lotus product as a spreadsheet and I have I use a uh
[speaker001:] uh-huh
[speaker002:] what you see is what you get editor for almost all of my word processing so I have not although I have access at home to things like Works and WordPerfect uh but I I do not obviously notice it I I think the thing that surprises me most when I change work to home environment is the cursor speed and after I if initially get over the uh the cursor speed in the sense of moving linearly across the screen uh as opposed to tabbing
[speaker001:] uh-huh
[speaker002:] uh I'm a touch typer and I haven't ever really noticed uh differences uh the machine tends to react as fast as I can I use an eighty as a matter of fact use an eighty eighty eight at at home uh which is really old iron uh probably ten years or so and and at the office uh I am indeed using a three eighty six um I use a PC for a great deal of things in in private life uh I'm a church treasurer
[speaker001:] um
[speaker002:] and I use the machine a lot on a uh uh data base and financial package that that operates at the church office I do some uh volunteer work at home using uh a buttons PC file program that uh is a very simplistic relational data base for labels and things so I guess I would have to say on a home setting I'm probably on the personal computer as much as an hour a day on average at home
[speaker001:] um well that's good
[speaker002:] um except I don't have a concern too much about the speed however because most of the applications I find are as fast as I am if not more so and I tend to notice it more when it comes down to an issue of peripherals uh at work I'm used to various batch printing capabilities and uh pretty high-speed output either laser printer uh
[speaker001:] uh-huh
[speaker002:] or uh machines like uh IBM thirty eight twenty high speed uh APA printers and so I get frustrated uh watching things slowly come out upon my matrix printer more so than I do over over access speed um
[speaker001:] right
[speaker002:] I guess that I have gotten to the point where if if I didn't have the personal computer I would be impacted a great deal on the things that I do in my life I'm I'm sure I would probably find ways to return to what I was doing in nineteen eighty one when I got my first home computer but it it would be I think a dramatic a dramatic sense of loss on on some items
[speaker001:] on your editor do you do uh does it do spell correcting or any kind of thesaurus work
[speaker002:] uh no I have access to uh spell correction uh material I seldom I seldom use it although when I'm at the office and I'm producing work correspondence uh I I run about ninety per cent of my office work on a mainframe
[speaker001:] uh-huh
[speaker002:] uh I I execute on a three eighty six machine that is attached to the mainframe as a server as a intelligent work station but I use it
[speaker001:] uh-huh
[speaker002:] frequently as a dumbhead to get to the mainframe and and there I tend on almost all of my editing and stuff to to be using some fairly powerful
[speaker001:] right
[speaker002:] editors and word processors and and wordproof but surprisingly at home and I seldom ever bother uh or worry about it too much uh I guess ultimately I'm not a a horribly bad speller although I have a tendency to lisp when I type so to speak uh nothing that that's particularly horrible and I think most of the work word processing I do since it's somewhat of a personal nature I've probably don't have a sense of vulnerability in this in in the even that I were to send to to send a a misspelled word out the way one might have at the office place
[speaker001:] right well I tend to that's one thing I notice the speed difference in when I have a darc document that's maybe twenty or thirty pages long and I want to
[speaker002:] uh
[speaker001:] search through it for the spelling it takes forever on an old uh X T at at four point seven seven megahertz you know the the old old ones and we're looking at uh several minutes worth of time for it to go through and check everything as opposed to a three eighty six where I can just you know it flashes through there and then even just file copying I I do some of that every once in awhile and you know if you had thirty or forty files to copy from one place to another and you're maybe reorganizing some places on the hard drive I have an X T at work oh excuse me I have an X T at work that takes forever to copy and then I have a three eighty six that just you know they're they're gone they're just over there right away
[speaker002:] okay
[speaker001:] and little things like that I I've noticed the speed difference in and I do some graphics uh I haven't done any well I've done a little bit for the for the house at work but uh if I were to bring it home uh or have a machine at home I would like to be able to put together small uh brochure type things with the the front page being a little little bit of graphics and the inside being printed in a uh what I would call a booklet form there are some editors that will produce uh the you know print it sideways and and collate it in such a way that this page comes out right so that you can fold all these eight and a half by elevens and make a little booklet and
[speaker002:] right
[speaker001:] my I've done that on occasion at at work and my wife does some uh teaching you know little bitty weekend type teaching for some women in the area and and she likes to work up little outlines and things in this format and so I do all the work for her at work and it would really be nice to be able to do it here and say is this what you want you know instead of going back and forth every day it takes us a little while to get it right but uh I don't know maybe someday we'll uh get around to getting something decent uh
[speaker002:] that's that's an interesting point I think a the more I as I've thought about
[speaker001:] to bring home
[speaker002:] our conversation I realize that one of the things that perhaps causes me not to get a jarring difference between the two locations is that at the office I'm doing work things that in some ways are dissimilar from what I do at home uh and as a result I don't get the comparative feel uh I suspect if I were coming home and trying to do some of the projects I do at the office I would go crazy on my on my machine uh I haven't tended to play the games and and uh do the applications at work that I do at home so I probably have never been in
[speaker001:] right
[speaker002:] noticed how wonderful it might be uh I suspect Lotus One Two Three and spreadsheet application might be the one common thread um and there I think that even though I'm on an eighty eighty eight at home that the speed is really quite adequate uh and and I consequently don't even really notice uh the the difference between the the fast machine and and the eighty eighty eight
[speaker001:] uh-huh yeah unless they're tremendously large they're not going to make that much difference
[speaker002:] right right I I do have some uh retirement modeling that I've done at home that uh tends to crawl uh which on which I've just turned the calculation off in between and a couple of models that I've
[speaker001:] uh-huh
[speaker002:] built uh for for school purposes that I start in the evening and then go to bed and get them the next morning but they would have run an hour and a half even on a thirty three eighty six machine I imagine so
[speaker001:] um
[speaker002:] I suspect that what happens is that uh you get to the point where it's so long that uh from a human being perspective there's not much difference between six hours and an hour and a half
[speaker001:] right
[speaker002:] um
[speaker001:] that's interesting I hadn't I hadn't run into anything quite that long or fortunately there