Pre-Internet White Collar Workers

250,000 dead Americans wrote:

I'll never forgive the Media and Nixon for dragging the Vietnam war defeat along for years and years after the 1968 Tet debacle. Another 150,000 Americans died in Vietnam and after being discharged from their wounds for a total of 250,000 dead Americans.

The US military intervention in Vietnam was a mistake, and every death and other kind of casualty suffered by US forces and the Vietnamese as well as Thais, Laotians & Cambodians was a tragedy. However, your figures regarding US deaths are way off.

The US government & veterans groups say that out of the 3,400,000 military personnel deployed to SE Asia during/for the Vietnam War, a total of 58,220 died. 45,000-47,5000 (depending on your source) were KIA or died of battle wounds. Another 11-13,000 died of accidents, illness, homicide, suicide, or were declared or presumed dead.

Approximately 153,000 US military personnel suffered non-fatal wounds in the Vietnam conflict too. 75,000 were severely disabled; 23,214 were 100% disabled; 5,283 lost limbs and 1,081 sustained multiple amputations.

During the time of the USA's military involvement in Vietnam, approximately 9,000,000 persons served in the US military overall. The VA says that of this much larger total, there were another 32,000 "non-theater" deaths of US military personnel during the time the US was engaged in warfare in Vietnam.

All governments lie about casualties. Normally 10x times greater than what the CEO announces as"the company line". The US lost around 500,000 dead soldiers when you could those killed in Vietnam and who died in hospitals after being discharged from the Army, 5,000 Americans are list by the US Govt as POW/MIA when many believe at least twice as many were abandoned by their own buddies to rot in the jungles otr serve as Sex Slaves.

It was busy but I could control my work flow a lot more without computers. I used to call it "strategic submission of paperwork" ie submit something at a certain time, knowing it would not be attended to for several days, etc.

Surprised no one has mentioned the not-so-mobile phones of the mid- and late-eighties:

https://newatlas.com/mobile-pnone-40-year-anniversary-photos/25677/#gallery:3

Wrong photo. Click through to see the real dinosaur.

G Cup wrote:

In the late 80s/very early 90s I remember my father, who worked in R&D for an automotive company, bringing his 'laptop' home.

I could barely lift it, and it came inside what looked like a large beige plastic briefcase. No windows - DOS prompt only. I remember playing a game called Mars Attacks on it, but I've no idea what my dad actually used it for. Just a status symbol I think.

Did it look something like this? I used one too in that same period - I think it was made by Zenith. I wrote a lot of lotus-123 macros at the time. They would typically take about an hour to run so I would start them before I went to lunch as only one software program could run at a time. You could literally watch the cursor moving across the screen as it executed each command.

As an analyst we all had desktops in the office but only one portable between about 5 of us so we took turns taking it home. One morning while I was driving into work on a highway someone ran a stop sign and pulled right in front of me at and I hit him broadside going around 50. My car was totaled but fortunately I wasn't hurt. The computer was in its case in the trunk but it somehow ended up inside the car in the back seat. When I finally got around to checking it just started right up as if nothing had happened. They really were built like bricks.

This was the first portable computer I had to service:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Portable_Personal_Computer#/media/File:IBM-portable-PC-01.jpg

We called them "luggables". It weighed 30 pounds!