I got introduced to computers at work in 1979, well before personal computers. The company techies hooked me up to their UNIX hosts (DEC PDP-11's), which I accessed via a 1200 baud modem on my desktop. I also wanted computing at home, so I got a Texas Instruments Silent 700 portable data terminal, which looked like a portable typewriter with "earmuffs" into which you inserted the handset from a phone. After that, I got the company to hook my home to a private local area network that improved my access speed--but all the terminals I used were dumb ones.

I worked as an executive speechwriter and I was wild for high availability computing because my clients didn't want to hear that the computer was down. I had logins on four physically separate mainframes, and when I finished a draft, I'd move it to each of the computers, character by character, as backups. I also had an incredible array of spare modems, terminals, printers and other equipment to cover me. Once, when I was writing a Congressional testimony for our CEO, I had DEC put a technician on 24-hour standby to bring up my mainframe in case of trouble. I had him come in at 3 a.m. twice to bring the mainframe up.

We got our first PCs in '87, and that's when I gave up all the mainframes. I could copy all of my work to floppy discs and bring them with me. If my PC failed, there were hundreds of others at work that I could use.