Technology perspective

I remember my first experience with Office Automation. Of course, I didn't know at the time to call it that. I just called it electronic mail. Exchanging messages with groups of people that I worked with was a great time saver. I also remember my frustration when I found out that I couldn't send mail outside my own department. My secretary had her first brush with office automation on a word processing system. The problem again was that her system couldn't communicate with other systems. I found spreadsheets valuable, but I found myself mailing floppy disks around to exchange data. Obviously, we needed something better.