The inexorable march of computers into all areas of dental practice started in the 1980s. In the early years, this technology was limited to accounting procedures that ran under text-based operating systems like MS-DOS without having many other capabilities. However, billing software was still a huge improvement over manual billing, which was the common practice of the day. In those days, it was necessary to fill out patient insurance forms by hand, and a dot matrix printer was used to print full-surface stickon labels, which had to be adhered to the originals of the insurance forms.