More callouts, but none as interesting as this photo. Who remembers “Peachtree” from 1991, when I set up that software in Los Angeles? I was, that year, within an ace of teaming up with this lady running Peachtree out of her living room. She was ahead of the pack with computers, but she was in 1925 as far as sticking her nose into employee affairs. She felt she had a right to everyone’s most private information. Wrong. My rule is to tell an employer just barely enough information to get the job, and I was never out of work.
[Author's note: Peachtree, a 1978 product, is listed by Wikipedia to be the the oldest software in the world still in continuous use and is the largest competitor to Quickbooks. I don't like either product, as they do not make accounting any easier at the user level. Basic Peachtree sells for around $200 and is the better value, although Peachtree markets software packages in the $1,200 range. Would it not be cheaper to streamline your business practices?]
I was over at Professor Howard’s place, one of my original students. He hauled out an old Rogers 1630 [brand of reel-to-reel tape recorder]. It was missing the capstan, so I did what any true-blue American would do—I fashioned one out of duct tape. Well, that and some unexplained surgical tubing found in the garden shed, of all things. The experiment was unsuccessful but without the exact factory capstan, the playback speed is wrong. There are perfectly good new models on eBay for less than $50.
Howard had looked around for somebody to digitalize his reel-to-reels of a radio show he did while younger. That was up near New York (apparently) and they did critiques on movies, such as the films shown to GIs about venereal diseases. The best price he got from a recording studio was $59 per hour! That is clearly one industry that has not kept up with the times. I showed Howard that by purchasing a few adapters, he had all the recording equipment he needed right in his home office. Hell, for $59 an hour I’ll do all the work myself. How do those studios even survive?
Then, it goes to show you how any big business spawns specialization. After a generation or two it usually peters out, but for some reason, not with music. What I mean is if you listen to the hit music of just 50 years ago, a lot of it was done by just placing a few microphones near the band. Johnny Cash cut hit records in twenty minutes in a living room. While it is nice to hear a good 64-channel mix, at what point is the music no longer “live”. I would welcome a return to basics.
The day was started over at the shop, later I was over at that place with the Win98 setup, the Peachtree place. There is a point with Win98 when you have to give up and walk away, but what a priceless setup over there. That location is proof that a given computer installation will work for ten years if you leave it alone. Unfortunately, they no longer had the original installation disks and the installed copy got corrupted.
Return Home
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
