Lordy, Lordy, Look Who’s Forty: A Trip Back to 1986

Dial back 40 years to 1986 and compare it to 2026. Discover how far business technology has come—from floppy disks and MS-DOS to AI and the cloud.

The Desktop

In 1986, the personal computer was finally making headway inside of corporate workplaces; it just wasn’t the sleek, silent laptop you use today. Let’s take a trip back to the mid-80s and talk about some of the technology you might have seen.

• The hardware: The IBM PC XT and the newly minted Compaq Deskpro 386 were the kings of the cubicle. A fast machine ran at 16 MHz (no, not GHz) and featured a massive 40 MB hard drive.
• The display: Forget the high-resolution monitors you use today. You were likely staring at a heavy, flickering CGA or EGA monitor that displayed a whopping 16 colors, if you were lucky. At this point, most people were still working in Green Screen monochrome.
• The storage: Floppy disks were actually floppy. The 5.25-inch disk was the standard, holding about 360 KB of data. Moving a large file meant carrying a stack of plastic squares across the office in a color-codex Rolodex-style carrier.

The Software Suites

There was no auto-save and certainly no real-time collaboration. If two people needed to work on the same budget, they took turns sitting at the computer. Here are some of the software workers of the era used.

• Word processing: WordPerfect was the titan of the era. It was a text-heavy environment where you had to memorize Function Key combinations to do something as simple as bolding a word.
• Spreadsheets: Before Excel dominated the world, Lotus 1-2-3 was the killer app that convinced businesses they actually needed computers.
• The OS: You didn’t point and click much. You typed. MS-DOS 3.2 was the standard, requiring users to know commands like DIR, COPY, and DEL. Windows 1.0 existed, but in 1986, it was largely considered a slow, clunky novelty.

The Pre-Internet Dark Ages

This is the hardest part for professionals under 30 to grasp: The office was an island.

• • Email: It existed, but mostly on internal mainframes or through services like BITNET. For most, sending a memo meant typing it, printing it on a Dot Matrix printer (the ones with the perforated paper edges you had to tear off), and putting it in a physical In-Box.
  • The fax machine: 1986 was the beginning of the Fax Revolution. At the time, it was the height of high-speed transmission; sending a grainy black-and-white image over a phone line in about 60 seconds was considered pure sorcery.
  • Research: If you had a technical problem, you didn’t Google it. You opened a 400-page printed manual or called a guy who had been at the company for 20 years.

The IT Professional’s Life

Back then, being an IT guy meant being a literal mechanic. You spent your days:

• • Configuring jumpers: Manually setting pins on physical circuit boards to tell the computer how much RAM it had.
  • Managing the room: If your company was big enough, you had a mainframe or Minicomputer that sat in a refrigerated room and required a dedicated professional to maintain.
  • Physical security: Cybersecurity was mostly about locking the office door so nobody stole the $5,000 computer.

Looking back at 1986 reminds us that technology is a journey of removing friction. We’ve moved from commands to clicks to conversations. While we might complain when the Wi-Fi drops for thirty seconds today, in 1986, you’d spend thirty minutes just waiting for your computer to warm up and boot from a floppy.

We’ve come a long way from the green glow of the ‘86 office, but the goal remains the same: making the tools work so the people can create.

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