It was 1994. The internet was barely emerging. PCs were heavy, expensive and unreliable. A tablet had 100 pages of yellow, lined paper, and you used a ballpoint pen – not a stylus or your finger – to write. It was also the dawn of effective packaged software.
During the 1980s, companies began adopting Material Requirements Planning (MRP) systems. Most available systems at the time were bare bones, so companies often customized them heavily or wrote their own. They used 80-column punch cards for data entry, and users often got reports several days later. As we approached 1990, cathode ray tube monitors became common – immense objects with tiny screens that glowed with green or yellow characters. Users had to memorize now-arcane commands and navigate primitive menus to use business software.