Hi all,
A little light Sunday post.
My team and I just spent the past week working 10+ hours/day (I know that's nothing, we're all full time students though and it's final's season) cranking out a pitchbook from scratch for a few former bankers who teach at our school now. In addition to all the valuations, then M&A and LBO analysis, it was insane thinking about how many hours we spent formatting small things on PPT.
This made me think - how did IB professionals "back in the day" make and continuously update pitchbooks (10-20x) without a computer? Moreover, I can't imagine building all these models by hand w/o Excel. Obviously, CapIQ/FactSet/Bloomberg weren't available either so I imagine they must've read countless Q's and K's.
Curious as to whether any of you guys have any insight on this.
https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/before-there-was-excel
Manually draw your 50MB model on 20x A3 pages, blow your brains out when your VP asks you to run scenarios.
They carved cash flows into stone tablets and did DCF calculations using an abacus
Re-posted comment from mergersandacquisitions78(https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/user/92397)
*I still have to write my history of investment banking post. Someday, I will find the time.*
*Lotus-123 came out in the early-80s and that changed everything. That, along with the M&A boom, was really the birth of investment banking as we know it today from a junior banker perspective. Excel took over from Lotus in the 1990s but in a sense spreadsheets are spreadsheets. Its no surprise that the first formal analyst programs were in the early to mid 80s.*
*For a few years before Lotus-123, there was apparently "the computer" which associates (analysts were very rare before spreadsheets) had to book where you provided model inputs and then an hour later, you got outputs.*
*Before that it was graph paper and a calculator with a typing pool that typed up the model outputs. I'm told my people who were junior bankers in that era that it was a blessing and curse. Obviously it was a pain in the ass but people were thoughtful about the analysis they wanted. There was no "run me an accretion / dilution analysis for 12 targets at 5 different premia using base case, upside case and downside case earnings, and I want that at 8am tomorrow"*
[Link to thread](https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/comment/1714770#comment-1714770)
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