Back in the mid 80's
I worked for a while as a sales rep for a office machines company. Shortly before the PC was a reality, we used to sell Olivetti word processors (ETV 300). They were like a PC base unit which had 1 big old 7" floppy drive (literally floppy). (360K per disk) They cost about three bastard grand each and you had to link them to an Olivetti typewriter (ET 111 or 115). We had just installed 6 of these at a big estate agents in Huntingdon UK.

Shortly after the installation we had several callouts to the same woman who was complaining "the disks were not remembering the documents". It turns out she had terrible hand writing, and her boss had told her to type the disk labels so he could file them properly. The silly cow only stuck the labels on the disks first, then fed them through the plattern of her typewriter. It was then the company decided to take us up on our offer of some ludicrously expensive training sessions, which I also ran.

I was holding a training session with all 6 secretaries in the board room with all their machines plugged in in front of them and I was explaining to them how the functions work. Now the typewritter had an AUX key (unique back then). To do anything like save, print etc you held down the AUX key and pressed 'P' for Print, 'S' for Save, 'B' for bold etc etc. Now if you just held down the AUX key for a couple of seconds, a full page of info would eventually load telling you all the AUX functions, so I said, "Don't worry if you forget all these, there is a page of information to remind you if you press the AUX key and wait".
The same fuckwit put her hand up and asked, "Where's the WAIT key?". I've heard this told recently only updated to fit a fat handed PC twat but I swear that is where it came from.

Oh and just for the nerds....
Soon after this the first Olivetti PC arrived, the M20. It didn't work and they lost a fortune then they came up with an IBM compatible called the M24. It ran at a staggering 1.44MHz, had a 10 megabyte winchester hard disk, a hercules green screen or you could have amber or grey/white text and the Olivetti version of MS-DOS 2.1 and 64K RAM. This bit's good. You could also order a parallel printer cable for a mere £120 extra. Epson had just released the dot matrix printer which ran at about 97db and about 40 characters per second. A complete PC/Printer package would cost you about £5k.
( Captn Hood-Butter is not dead yet., Mon 25 Sep 2006, 17:45, Reply)