うづひな　in　computerland

I got paid for 3 days of work back in my consulting days for Computerland of Somerville, New Jersey to run the 26 disks to install and set up Windows 95. I still remember the sound and the muscle memory. I lost count after 100 installs. CDs could not come soon enough!

Computerland

Computerland radnje.

Driving Gloves And The Spreadsheet That Conquered the World And Vanished In October 1979, weeks after VisiCalc shipped as the very first electronic spreadsheet for the Apple II, I was already teaching it in offices across New Jersey. Just a punk kid talking to suits No connections, no inside track just a me with the original disks and a room full of wide-eyed accountants who had never seen anything like it. Then, on the week Lotus 1-2-3 officially launched January 26, 1983, I walked into Computerland of Somerville as their external trainer. Snow on the ground, radiators hissing, and executives from some of New Jersey’s biggest companies treating every @ function and macro like sacred knowledge. I trained them on Release 1 straight out of the box. They all believed they were building something permanent. Back then, the spreadsheet was supposed to be the ultimate moat. Wall Street analysts, CIOs, and tech prophets declared it the forever business. Lotus was the killer app that sold the IBM PC. Profits looked eternal. No one, not a single person I trained, not a single expert writing in the trade press would have believed you if you said that one day nobody would care what brand of spreadsheet they used. “Good enough” was good enough? They would have laughed you out of the room. Yet that is exactly what happened. By the late 1980s Lotus had doubled down with Release 3. It was a technological leap 3D worksheets, better graphics, rewritten in C but it came at a steep price. The list price was $495, more than $1,330 in today’s dollars. And that was just the software. To run it “all in” you needed a high-end 286 or 386 PC, a hard disk, and at least 2 MB of RAM, hardware that typically cost $3,000 to $6,000 in 1989 (roughly $8,000 to $16,000 in today’s dollars). The full setup per workstation easily pushed the total investment to $4,000–$7,000 back then, or well over $10,000–$19,000 when adjusted for inflation. Companies paid it because they thought the moat was permanent. They were wrong. Microsoft Excel arrived: good enough, and perfectly timed with the Windows boom. Then came cheaper competitors, open-source, cloud spreadsheets, and finally free, ubiquitous options baked into every laptop and phone. The “spreadsheet market” as a distinct, high-margin category simply evaporated. Today, no one under forty even thinks about it. It’s infrastructure, like electricity or paper. Invisible. Commodity. The brand name that once defined an entire industry is a footnote. Look around your life right now and you’ll see the same pattern everywhere. We are not surrounded by the absolute best products, nor by the absolute cheapest. We are surrounded by the good enough ones that won. The operating system on your phone, the video app you use, the note-taking tool you open every day, none of them are perfect, but they are accessible, cheap or free, and they spread like wildfire until they became the default. That is precisely where we are headed with artificial intelligence. The smartest voices today insist AGI and ASI will remain scarce, proprietary, and eternally profitable. They talk about intelligence as the ultimate moat. I smile when I hear it because I’ve lived this exact story before, on those freezing mornings in Somerville, New Jersey. Coding AIs like Claude (or whatever comes next) will soon be so common, so freely available, and so embedded in everything that no one will pay premium prices for them, just as no one pays premium prices for spreadsheets anymore. The intelligence layer will become generic. Cheap. Everywhere. Invisible. “Good enough” always wins. History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes and the rhyme this time is going to rewrite every industry, including the one that thinks it’s building the final, unassailable moat. The spreadsheet taught us that lesson the hard way. The AI era is about to teach it again, only faster. This video is peak 1980s vibe, remember to put on your driving gloves…

Funny story, I got my 1st job at 13 in 1984 at Computerland in LA because the manager pulled my parents aside after I identified to memory pins touching on the memory expansion card of our IBM AT and caused Parity Errors. I worked there until new owners had to let me go cause of my age. Since then I have only worked in tech and started my own IT business in 1997. Crazy to think they let me work weekends at 13, but I learned SO much in that year I worked there!

Computerland was how I ended up in Japan. Managed to get hired by one of the few Japan stores since the Japanese computers of the time weren't compatible with IBM standards and they needed an English speaker as the customers were all foreign. That was June of 1986. Still here.

My first job involving computers was at Computerland in Belmont, CA (SF Bay Area). Also bought my first computer (Apple ][ ) there. 40-odd years later I’m at the tail end of a long path and still doing computer stuff. It’s been a ride!!

I worked for ComputerLand Corporate in early 90s and covered the remaining NJ and some NY franchisees. Apple Business Development Manager then National Account Manager, my office was in Elmwood Park.

What is the story of computerland? @grok

I remember going to a Computerland in NJ , and asked for a different computer. Sales guy: "You don't want that - it's plastic. This IBM - it's iron and steel; this is what you want." I never laughed that loudly in my life.

My old Computerland is the Farm and Fisherman now. 😭

beautiful I had been to most of those Computerland locations at that same time frame

The day the IBM PC was released, I was at this Somerville, New Jersey Computerland. There was no way a poor kid like me could own one. But I knew if I could hang out enough I could learn it. After a few weeks Tom the manager said “Roemmele you want get paid for this?”. I said yes and went about setting up and training 100s of executives at Central New Jersey corporations for almost a decade. I worked my own hours and this lifted me out of poverty. I got my first Apple II and Macintosh here as well as my first LaserWriter and Apple Camera. I would go to the local florist and pick up red roses for the IBM PC display. They spent a lot, but IBM demanded real roses and “fined” any sales company that did not have one with the display. One day in my first year the owner came in and said “who is this kid?” Tom said, “Oh that is Brian, he sold more computers and software than all our outside sale combined and he is not in sales”. The owner came over and said shook my hand and said, “let me take you out for dinner, you and your girlfriend”. He was kind and generous to me and offered me key consulting gigs around the state. So seeing this commercial pop up in my VHS AI training knocked me over. Tom did not have to bet on me and even guess a stuttering geek could do this work, but he did. Nothing but gratitude for this start…

I was the ComputerLand Global Account Manager for Time Warner in 1996 and snuck into a meeting when Ted Turner was speaking to the Time Inc sales force for the first time. He said that Time Warner had just acquired his company but “some people think it’s the other way around”

I am MS-DOS old. I was 13 in 1984 at my 1st job working on true blue IBM PC's at "Computerland". They hired me (with parental permission) on the weekends because I Identified two memory legs touching each other and causing a Parity Error on my Dad's newly purchased PC. The rest is history. I've only had 5 jobs in my life, all were IT related until I started my own IT Business in 1997.

Computerland. Get yourself a programming book and a PC in 1987. Go into debt if you have to.

Apparently, Computerland existed in other countries, too!

Well, if you had a Portable or a Deskpro, I worked on that. I was also the manager of the dealer demo software, so if you walked into a ComputerLand, and "greped" (search for strings in a program) the demo that was running there, you would find a block of code with my name in it. So..... Go try that and you will know MrEdgyNam's real name!

Mycom was altijd iets duurder. Wel goed spul. Ik kwam vaker bij oa Computerland.