Ha. The good old days. Do any of you...
...people remember pre-PC days?
I joined TXN Jan. 1, 1982. Was in a creative type position/marketing communications. While I wasn't responsible for producing camera-ready art myself, there were still many projects that required minimal design capabilities. (This was in Houston, INTCfan ... Brookhollow (leased) facilities (W. Little York/290 area) and the Cypress plant (now CPQ, which is interesting in itself).
The equipment we had to work with was pathetic!
As everyone who has worked in large corporations will tell you, MUCH TIME is devoted to 'progress reviews' ... called different things in organizations ... at TXN, we had "Quarterly Marketing Reviews." Basically, they were 'dog & pony shows' ... purpose was to justify our (and particularly all the managers in the ascending hierarchy above us) existences.
We made overhead transparency presentations.
For the managers, the task of creating the overhead presentation fell to the secretaries.
Word processing in early 1982 was done on what we called 'mini-systems.' I don't know what they were in technical terms ... I remember that we didn't even use WordStar ... it wasn't a 'nameable' word processing software program ...
The fax machine was almost as large as a desk, and worked maybe 20% of the time.
TXN did have an "intranet" electronic communication system even then, to their credit. Had a daily newspaper on it "TI News." Would view on the mini-system 'terminals.' Stock price/company news, PR, etc.
There were ZERO graphic capabilities on these systems. So, they were useless for overhead presentations. One typeface and it was Courier, I think -- typewriter style.
So, overhead presentations were 'typeset' by the secretaries on Kroy machines ... LOL! Anybody remember those?
Transparencies were created in transparency machines. Thermal. You put in the hard-copy Kroy-created design face-up against a transparency ... ran 'em through this machine that 'fried' <g> the type onto the transparency.
The TIME consumed by 15 or 20 marketing employees like me; five or six secretaries and the managers themselves preparing the content for these boondoggles; and the preparation of the transparencies (they'd all change 6-8 times before the actual event) was INCREDIBLE.
I'd estimate, thinking back, that each person spent probably 150 to 200 man-hours working on the QMRs.
Multiply that by say 30 people, you're looking at some big-time productivity waste, I'd call it, since these events not only did not contribute to improving the bottom line revs/sales of our division, but detracted from it because it tied up so many people for so many hours/days/weeks on end.
Today, I'd guess that time would be cut to a few hours because of PC technology.
It is just incredible, when you think about it. A mere 18 years ago this was.
'b-i-a'
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