From 1966 to 1968, Barbara Armajani, Siah's wife, held a retail buying position at The Dayton Department Store in Minneapolis. During this time, Dayton was among the first to use 'print-punch' reports to track apparel sales, and Barbara was selected to conduct a trial run in her department.

She recalls, "I often brought these sales reports home to work on. Siah, who at the time was taking courses at Control Data and learning about Fortran and other early computing languages, became very interested in these spreadsheets. As I finished with them daily and would typically dispose of them, Siah began taking them."

Siah found these sheets intriguing and spent time working on them, primarily by superimposing drawings on top of the reports, as in this group of five sheets.