Photo by Allison Sepanek

When Dante Roscini (MBA 1988) arrived on campus in 1986, he and members of his class each became the de-facto owner of an IBM PC Convertible (purchase was mandatory for all incoming students). As conceived by German industrial designer Richard Sapper, the laptop-style machine weighed just over 12 pounds and featured a nifty carrying handle. It had no internal operating system but there was a floppy drive for that. Another drive was available for case exhibits, which students could work on using the spreadsheet program Lotus 1-2-3. “It was literally a glorified calculator-typewriter-computing machine, but it felt very, very cool at the time,” Roscini recalls. The machine also could be plugged into a dot-matrix printer.

“Our first night at HBS, my roommate and I skipped class prep and went to Harvard Square for pizza and beer,” he says. “It was still summer, and warm, so all the windows were open, and when we came back to campus, we could hear the dot-matrix printer noise everywhere. We thought, ‘Oh boy, people have typed out their notes for class; we’ll be in trouble tomorrow.’ ”

Roscini joined the HBS faculty as a professor of management practice in 2008, after a two-decade career in finance at Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley. The IBM relic, now a great icebreaker with students, has a place of honor in his Morgan Hall office, where he can look out at his old dorm room in Hamilton.

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