I was a young trial lawyer back in 1977 working for a firm that billed by the hour. We kept track of what work we did on cases on sheets of paper with pull-off strips that clerks would take from completed sheets and paste onto a board inside each paper folder for a case.

In 1979 I bought a radio-shack Tandy I. Soon I was deep into playing at home with Foxbase, a DOS based database program (later known as FoxPro and bought by MSft in the early 1990s). In 1981 I opened my own firm. Back then the newest advance in office production was the fax machine and electric typewriters that had one line screens; memory; and tiny disks that could hold forms. Businesses still did not use personal computers.

My law firm soon had ~10 attorneys and another 12 support staff. I bought Compaq computers fir every secretary. I spent much of my time writing a time and billing program to replace the manual paste-strips. Then I learned how - and installed - a network. No other firm I knew of had a computer. We had 10+ for the support staff plus 4-5 "portable" Compaqs for attorneys to review the bills before they were sent to clients.

Meanwhile I was running the business into the ground. We had world-class tech before anyone else had even one computer, but I wasn't focused on lawyering or smoozing the business clients. Instead I was locked up behind closed doors programming. I finally closed the firm in 1994.

But they sure were exciting times - soon every from had computers for word processing but commercial billing programs didn't exist. For a period of maybe 24 months, every lawyer from other firms I worked with wanted my billing program. But I was too focused on having fun programming while drowning trying to keep up with my case load. My law practice was the perfect lab from my programs. Too bad my programming ruined my business.

Edit: corrected horrible number of typos.