I wasn't much on the desktop stuff, but had a number of early technologies to work with starting with Artemis in 1981.  I spent several month creating a catalog of piping isometrics, spool sheets, loop diagrams.  The big news was when we purchased fax machines that didn't require us to call recipients and determine what kind of fax device they were using.  We installed our first imaging system in 1982, I forget the name at the moment.  I do recall that it was horrible. Larry Medina may recall the database we used for tracking vendor documents at the time.  The first word processer was built by Exxon, cost slightly more than $200,000 and could be used by two at one users at one time.  Beginning in 1985, we used AccessMaster as our CAR system software.  It used the PICK operating system and provided functionality I dream about getting into today's ECM platforms.  

My first ediscovery exercise was in 1990 when we searched PROFS.  In early 1994 we built our first large scale ediscovery platform after a one day trip to the AIIM Show in Chicago.  It used PixTex EFS OCR and pattern recognition software on SPARC servers to search imaged documents.  The application could search across our large collection of materials very efficiently.  One of the real benefits is that it could search patterns as well as text.  Helpful when the collection included several hundred thousand engineering drawings.  Searches could be conducted at any of our ND facilities as well as by outside counsel in Washington, DC and Michigan.  T-1 connections to the offices in DC and MI were expensive, costing several thousand dollars a month.  

We ordered our first PC's in 1994.  We ordered a thousand, the vendor delivered 10.  No one had ever ordered more than 10 previously, they though the order was a mistake.  About the same time we created an Internet Service Company to provide internet to our member cooperatives.  My first access of the internet was the night before I demonstrated it to several hundred attendees at the Cooperative's Annual meeting.

In late 1994 we licensed Saros Mezzanine, Watermark, and Greenbar and deployed the applications to 3,000 users across three states.  According to Saros, it was the first enterprise-wide document management deployment in the country.  We had looked at FileNet's Image Manager at the time but decided we wanted to keep documents in their native format, not as images.  FileNet bought the product in mid-1995 so we became a FileNet shop.  

Didn't think much about it at the time, we were simply choosing the best solutions for the job.  Looking back, it has been a blast...

Glen, thanks for a great topic.

Bill Roach, CRM

Opinions are my own and not those of my employer or any other individual or entity.

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