Wine, Cheese, and the Future (1985-ish)

Reflecting on what once seemed like magic.

My memory of dates is vague, but I’m fairly sure all of this happened in the summer of 1985. I would have been 28 years old. That feels right.

IBM was in the middle of launching the Personal Computer, fronted by a Charlie Chaplin “Little Tramp” figure in its global marketing campaign. The idea was simple enough: make this strange new thing seem friendly, human, even playful.

The Tramp was everywhere.

One evening, working late in IBM’s London Southbank office, I opened a cupboard door and came face-to-face with a life-size cardboard cut-out of him. I nearly had a heart attack. I had to stop myself from punching Charlie in the face.

Around the same time, someone — I can’t remember who — came up with the idea of a weekly wine and cheese event, held in the early evening. The plan was to catch City bankers and senior executives on their way to Waterloo station before heading home to the affluent suburbs of Wimbledon, Weybridge and Walton-on-Thames.

We would wine them. We would dine them. And, gently, we would show them what the IBM PC could do — without frightening them with too much technology.

A little performance was devised.

The script centred on a busy executive at his desk, overwhelmed with work. There was a telephone, but how to make it ring on cue? Easy. We recorded a real phone ringing onto a cassette recorder and hit play at the right moment.

I would sit at the back of the room. The phone would ring. I’d dash to the desk, slightly flustered, lift the receiver.

“Smith here. How can I help you?”

On the desk sat an IBM PC, its screen projected onto a large display behind me. I would pretend to be talking to my boss and perform a series of small but purposeful tasks:
check my calendar,
write a memo,
create a small table of numbers.

The whole thing lasted about fifteen minutes.

This was when DOS was king, long before Microsoft Windows entered everyday use. IBM TopView — a multitasking environment that sat on top of DOS. It provided multiple windows into different programs (we didn’t call them apps in those days). Whatever happened to Top View?

The real highlight came near the end.

One of those windows was a terminal emulator into PROFS, IBM’s corporate email and calendaring system running on a VM mainframe somewhere far away. Maybe Portsmouth.

This is where it got exciting.

For the grand finale, I would cut a table of data from one window and paste it directly into a PROFS email. There would be an audible gasp from the audience. A moment of stunned silence and then an actual applause.

I know it sounds ridiculous now.

But it was so astonishing at the time that we’d repeat the trick – this time cutting text from a DisplayWrite document and pasting that into the email as well.

A final line into the phone:

“Hey boss — what you asked for is on its way.”

Receiver down. Small bow.
More wine. More cheese.

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@ Copyright 2026 Steve Gillies. All rights reserved.