I talked to Doreen a couple of months after she'd been fired by her employer of over thirty years. As is normal these days, that employer provided her with a few months of "outplacement" services. She could use the outplacement firm's computers for document preparation, email and web access, and she could attend training sessions on resume-writing, interview-taking, and career-planning; but the computer training was limited to novice, end-user courses courses on standard applications. Doreen would soon need a high-end computer system for her about-to-be-launched career as a freelance marketing consultant, and she needed advice on purchasing a system that would be up to the task. In her new business she planned to analyze clients' retail environments, and present her conclusions to senior marketing staff, using PowerPoint slides shows annotated by video clips extracted from the recorded experiences of customers and "secret shoppers".
I'd met Doreen years earlier, when we occasionally worked together on IT projects at Simpsons-Sears, at the time a catalogue-only retail company affiliated with its Canadian and American namesakes. I was working then as a "systems programmer", and I was more concerned with intricate technical operating systems details than with corporate strategies. But Doreen was able to see through my myopic visions to glean marketing insights about a revolutionary new computer system that we were about to install. We were building an application where customers would actually be able to place orders by pressing keys on a telephone keypad in response to audio prompts containing information from the retail catalogue. "Press 1 for red" and "Press # for bell-bottoms." Yes, I know: you do that every day. But this was the mid-1970s, when most telephones still had dials, and only academics and military men had ever heard about something called the "inter net". A visionary Sears VP was leading us in that amazing project (which was later called "Comp-U-Shop") ... whose successful delivery I may write about at another time; this is Doreen's story, about a marketing consultant's experiences with 21st century computers.
Doreen needed a self-contained, portable delivery system for her client presentations, which meant she needed to buy a notebook computer and a digital projector. However, she would also be spending many hours in her home/office writing reports, preparing presentations, and editing video clips. I was concerned that after just an hour squinting at a small screen and pecking at a shrunken keyboard she would be in need of major chiropractic adjustments. Long-term use of a notebook computer can't really be made ergonomic (staring straight ahead at the top of the display, with your arms at right angles to the keyboard), unless if you have the body proportions of a small child. I told Doreen about a computer solution that might meet her needs: a notebook that came with a sturdy multifunction block of connectors that would mate with a "port replicator" tucked under a monitor stand. At home she could slot that model of notebook into the port replicator, which would be permanently connected to the monitor and to her other home peripherals: keyboard, mouse, printer, modem... She could quickly lift out the notebook and take it on the road to a client, where she would use its normal connector to mate it to the digital projector that displayed her presentations.