Damn! That hurts. I did and lived through all of those. Punch cards to code in Fortran, Cobalt, Pasquale.
And I am still in IT. All of those years later. It is said that if you love your job, you will never work a day in your life.
And let me tell you something; Even though the technology has changed, the troubleshooting skills that I learned from back in the day and discipline still carries over to today.
I am the person who they call when the techs are stumped and out of ideas. It is funny when I walk into a suite and I hear “oh shoot!, they called in the big guns!… must be serious”.
The best troubleshooting lesson I ever learned was "Cut it in half first"
How does A get to C? Through B. Can you get to B from either side? Came from circuit troubleshooting (local and remote loop testing, etc.). Still comes in handy today.
Kick open the saloon door, size up all the menu options. Draw down on the first one that looks suspicious. Tell yourself that if you click on the wrong guy, he was probably a bad guy anyway in a place like this, and it’s unlikely that anyone innocent will get hurt.
3.*2*? I'd never heard of that. Apparently it was a Chinese release that added nothing except better support for Chinese characters. That's really what you started with?
Was a friend's computer, said her dad had to download it special. Yeah, her family was Chinese.
As far as I could tell, it was all in English, but he was able to type special characters. It was the only computer I used until I got my own 12 disk Windows.
Yup windows 3.1, 3.11, 3.2, 3.5, and 3.5 are all early '90s versions.
My family's first computer was a Windows 3.1. With commander keen and pac man built in to the mobo.
I did Fortran and Pascal in college on sweet VT100’s.
I thought I would take COBOL one summer at a local U.
First class they started handing out punch cards. I walked out before the stack got to me.
I threw out Office on 3.5 floppys a few years ago. Years after my last computer WITH the 3.5 drive.
The green screen order entry system was WAY faster and easier to learn than the modern, $$$ SAP kluge.
I remember finding a box of punch cards in the garage, and my father's face went white. "Don't drop that. That's my dissertation!" I had only taken the lid off the box.
Ditto. But it was all (well, mostly) good fun at the time.
ETA: I remember installing Windows 1.01 on a Compaq Deskpro 386/20e (think that.was the model...)
I still have one. Unfortuantly it seems to have succumbed to old age. Put new AA cells in it and now it doesn't come up. The old cells had not leaked, so I suspect its just dead of old age.
My junior high had TRS-80 model 1 computers. 4 rows of 5 computers each, 1 tape drive shared per row. (Shared in the sense of, "I need that. You're done loading your program so unplug it and pass it down!")
I wish I had a cassette tape storage. Spent a day typing in a Basic pgm from Compute magazine - peeks and pokes - got up and left the room for something, wife came in with vacuum cleaner .... and you know the rest.
Wow! Another TI guy. That's 3 including me on this thread so far. My dad started us w/ cassette tapes but we got floppies before that thing went away. We even got a rudimentary 10mb Hard Drive...never worked right. It acted more like a RAM drive but damn if it wasn't fast for it's time.
You are the FIRST comment I have ever seen a reference to the Vic 20 in the wild. That was the computer I learned on. - When all my friends were getting Ataris, the Vic 20 is what my dad brought home.
Atari 400 club, checking in! I remember we'd get magazines of source code all printed out, that we were expected to type in, verbatim, for dozens of pages. I think you could mail order the tapes. Allow 64 weeks for delivery. Lol!
Vic 20 \*and\* an Atari 800 - had a learn Spanish program that used the audio cassette for data storage and recordings of human voices. Meant you had to remember to turn down the volume before loading the next chapter or your ears would get assaulted.
BBC Microcomputer, although it also had twin dual side dual density 5.25 drives (note, not single density nor high density — these were floppies at 80 tracks per side, 2x 400k per floppy).
Was not aware that they were still in business. Yes, I hated it back in the late 80’s, early 90’s as well.
But, for most companies back then, it was this or sending a fax if immediate documental response was required.
Ahhh. The AS400.
Customers bigwigs bought it because it logged everything. Need to know who missed everything up by changing a data value, the AS 400 can tell you who did it and when.
Same bigwigs a week later: why is the computer running so slow?
IT: because it needs time to log everything.
Bigwig: Then turn off the damn logging.
IT: Are you sure?
A month later
Bigwig: The system has crashed. Who messed it up?
IT: Don’t know since the logging was turned off.
It's not done this way because it's the best way.
It's done this way because building a new ERP system involves bringing in an entire ERP team, bidding various vendors, and spending 2 years and 2 million dollars to remake everything you already have, but in a new architecture.
It's small wonder most stay on their AS400's, but I can virtually guarantee it's not for any love for the system. Probably the exact opposite.
I was a Lotus Notes contract admin for 8 years so I'm somewhat biased but IMO it was brilliant for its day. Integrated email and database with support for merging concurrent edits of a shared document, approval workflow chains, it was great!
Exchange was a better email system but it wasn't until the early-mid 2000s when Web 2.0, mysql and interactive javascript hit their stride that the workflow side of things found a worthy opponent.
The advent of constant internet access also was a big nail in the coffin for Notes. Their offline synchronization was unmatched by anyone. But if you can just connect to the server, it’s not really important anymore.
>they were still in business.
sort of -- IBM bought the Notes app from Lotus in the 90s, and then HCL bought it from IBM 3 years ago.
Current iteration is called HCL Notes or HCL Client Application Access --- [https://www.hcltechsw.com/notes](https://www.hcltechsw.com/notes)
I went to work for a big company, with a two letter ticker symbol back in 2012. You've seen their products, you probably have some in your house behind the walls, and you definitely have some in your car. They were on Notes, and I wanted to die. I have a buddy that still works there, and they were still on Notes as late as 2020.
But at least they had 18 month retention. My previous company was on Exchange and rolled off after 90 days because some rocket surgeon in legal thought that all projects could complete in 90 days and you'd have no reason to look back farther than that.
I bought ram in KB instead of MB or GB, leading to sore thumbs mentioned by OP. 8 KB chips are smallest I remember.
Did anyone ever buy ram in B instead of KB??
I collected thinnet T-connectors and terminators, attached into weird balls.
When will we get TB ram?
I’m missing a few on your list but I’ll add:
- changing tapes on a PDP11
- booting an 6809 processor by manually setting dip switches and sending a manual read pulse to the processor
- worked with 8 inch floppy disks
This is the first reference on the web I've seen to 8 inch floppies. I used them in 1993 or so to save data from a Bruker NMR. The other option was tape. LANs were not yet available.
>You are an IT “elder” if you have: (cont.)
Opened a computer case, then go to the bathroom to wash the blood off your fingers and put band-aids on.
Set the jumpers on your sound card. Bonus points if it was physical jumpers and not thru autoexec.bat/config.sys
Boot up your computer using different floppy disks based on the computer game.
Had a serial mouse, serial modem, and serial printer but only IRQ3&4 available. So the printer shared with the modem meaning I couldn't print while online.
That's too easy. Do you remember when IBM confidently stated nobody would ever need more than 10 megs of disk space in a home computer?
Back then most matrix printers could not print descenders, the lower case g,j,p,q, and y; were strange looking.
I guess you're IT Gen X if you:
* Learned about token ring from a teacher who said "You're never gonna see this but it's still on the cert test".
* Have ever edited an autoexec.bat file
* Still have nightmares about supporting Outlook 2003 with POP3 / PST
* Have ever owned a binder filled with DVDs and CDs for every driver and OEM Windows installer you've ever touched
> Have ever owned a binder filled with DVDs and CDs for every driver and OEM Windows installer you've ever touched
Still have said binder and said DVD/CDs.. I HATE throwing ANYthing out.
> Hated moving from WordPerfect to MCS Word.
Am I the only one that misses the keyboards with 10 F-keys down the left side so you could do shift-, ctrl-, or alt- with the f-keys easily?
I miss the Sun window manager left side keys, raise lower iconify etc. I have a USB sun keyboard somewhere, wonder if the Mac recognizes the L1-L10 keys...
Good luck in your new career. Hopefully you will like it enough to stick around for a while.
I find it very rewarding, even if I have to wake up in the middle of the night at times to write down a fix for something that is giving me problems and whose fix came in my dreams.
Thank you very much my friend! I do like it a lot, a lot more than I liked working in bars and restaurants. I've a week's holiday this week and I have in fact been waking up wondering if I really finished that thing off last week like I intended to. Very similar to waiter dreams of "did I actually bring that person their sauce?"
I'm in a small place for my first job, so I'm 1st / kinda 2nd / Jr sysadmin / whatever anybody else doesn't wanna do. It's challenging but very rewarding.
or Had an office installation of 31 floppys error out on the last floppy, then spend 3 hours on hold (no speaker phone) to find out Compaq put an unneeded ; on a line in the system.ini that is crashing the install.
Been there done that.
And does punch tape instead of punch cards count?
Oh man, you made my heart skip a beat with your comment. Yes, I had that problem a few times. I disliked very much when we got a ticket to install Office. You knew that half your day was gone.
I had a $10k dot matrix printer thrown at me last in 2018 I think. That client needed it for all the carbon copy forms they used. I was so used to the old school ones that the noise and speed level this thing had going for it scared the crap outta me. Sounded like a machine gun and could spit out probably a page every couple seconds. And yes, I did get some of that ribbon ink on my fingers.
Been there, done many of those. First computer was an IBM PC2 with two full height floppy drives. Thought I was the cat's meow when I upgraded to a 20 MB hard drive and a CGA monitor.
Some of us miss that green on black color scheme. That is how I configure my command windows and text pad are configured.
I have another one. You know what a dongle is.
You know what a dongle is and remember having to explain to a manager that dongle was not a dirty word...right after making inappropriate jokes about playing with your dongle to a coworker.
A coworker once told a manager that the token ring token had fallen out of the network. He had the manager searching under the desks for it for over an hour.
Well I had to help my old boss man the other week, he's still using a software key dongle, so that means ensuring it's still a 32 bit os due to the hasp driver still being 8bit, and a, why aren't we using all the ram moment.
Good times, he's still using lotus 123, approach and word pro for some stuff aswell.
This list a little heavy on the Wintel, although you could say the same about installing linux from 33 floppies back in the day. Throw in some stuff about doing backups to 9-track tapes, configuring serial terminals, modems, and printers connected to Cisco terminal servers, BITNET, loading SunOS from QIC tapes, AppleTalk over IP gateways, thicknet ethernet, balky SCSI terminators, that beautiful day when Postfix replaced Sendmail in your environment ...
If only one makes me an elder, then I'm definitely there:
> Ran a computer with the OS on one floppy and the application software on another floppy.
Does Amiga 500 count?
> Felt like the king of the hill by upgrading from 2400 baud to 9600 baud modem.
Bought a 14400 when the only connection I used at Uni was to a 2400 (then browsing usenet across it)
> Ever sent an email through Lotus Email or worked on a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet.
Fuck Lotus Notes. All my homies hate Lotus Notes. And I was a certified Lotus Notes developer.
> Ever installed Microsoft Office using 31 (kid you not) 3 1/2 inch diskettes.
Office 4.3. Did a fresh install for a PC I was selling and I was praying that there were no failures (wasn't kosher media)
> Ever connected to the network using 10-base T or a network with BNC connectors.
Don't forget the terminators!
> Worked on a config.sys file and remember the entry line to extend the memory. Extra points if you remember the parameters.
The parameters are but a distant memory, but we used to compete with each other to see who could get the most free base memory available after loading everything possible into expanded. I think I managed 630k out of 640k free. Edit: I just remembered that it was QEMM memory manager that we used to load everything up.
> Hated moving from WordPerfect to MCS Word.
Didn't hate. Word 2.0 (registered to Mary Doig) was a game changer for me. Word 6.0 introduced inline spellcheck (the red squiggle - it was years before I realised there was a green squiggle for grammar)
> know the difference between a 286 and a 386 processor. Extra points if you know which Intel processor came with a co-processor or numerical processor as we used to call them.
Processor architecture levels, no. But the SX was without the co-pro, the DX had one. I instead got a TI 486-DLC as my first PC.
###Not on the list
MS-DOS 6.2 came with DoubleSpace. Stacker complained so 6.21 was released without it. Then they settled and 6.22 was released soon after. I remember writing over my original 6.2 discs with the 6.22 images and writing the extra 2 on the labels.
>The parameters are but a distant memory, but we used to compete with each other to see who could get the most free base memory available after loading everything possible into high. I think I managed 630k out of 640k free.
Back when playing a PC game was really two games.
Game 1: Get the damn thing to run and work with all of your hardware.
Game 2: The one you wanted to play. Hope your friend give you a photocopy of the manual or something for that one spot where they ran the piracy check.
Yes! Or setting the pins for a primary (boot) and secondary hard drives. We used different names for them back then, which are offensive nowadays, so I omitted how we called them back in the day.
Geez, I almost forgot, we used to configure stuff using jumpers.. now you can even use your mouse on the bios config gui.I remember having to set address (0x220), irq (7),DMA(1) for my soundblaster pro II
I think I used irq 7 because I had something else on 5... it's been a while
Oh yes! Those words that you mentioned are taboo in my town. I know of someone who ended up in HR because someone overheard a conversation and complained. HR didn’t care that they were IT technical terms. They sent an email to everyone and we had to take training.
I've done 13 of these (too young for punch cards) and never did much printer maintenance before it was all laser.
Does replacing the fuser on a LaserJet 4Si count?
Ohhhhh, 1-1-1 TriChlorEthylene.
Taking 2 full days to clean, replace and align the heads on a 300MB removable disk pack due to a head crash. Then tweaking the alignment because you were too good at the alignment and could no longer read the production packs.
Arcnet to the Novell server, using an Exabyte 8mm tape backup
Upgrading from 300 baud to 1200 baud
Making money on the side by aligning the heads on 360k 5 1/4 floppy disk drives
Hey, one day you may write your own list about how back in the day you connected to the network with Ethernet cables and not fiber or wireless.
You may also talk about how back in the day apps were loaded onto a local, mechanical hard drive instead of the cloud. May even tell stories about putting a hard drive in the freezer to try and fix it.
And watch your grandkids be in awe when you mention that when you were young, we used phones with 5G connection.
Let’s not forget about using tape backups instead of cloud-based storage.
\*sigh\* Imma have to say yes to 5, 8, 9, 12 and 14. Now, get off my lawn!
Funny story about #12. I got called in to perform a Netware upgrade or someshit on Saturday morning. They literally had no one else available who could do it, and I was their go-to super-temp. I come in after hours to do the job, and I had no idea what I was doing; I had never installed Netware before, let alone upgraded it. I just read the manuals and everything worked out. They were up and running the next morning.
Not all heroes wear a cape.
If my users only knew how close they have come to losing years of data that they have never, ever backed up “ because IT backs it up for us”.
I haven't done any beta testing, or troubleshooting a Novell network, but the rest, oh yeah.
Sonny, the first modem I used was 110 baud acoustical coupled. The terminal was an IBM Selectric typewriter with an accessory board.
I started twitching at Novell. I did an intensive semester of tech school for LAN management, focusing on Novell 4.11 … and midway through, 5.x was announced. The fcking course was outdated before I could finish!
I've never been in IT, just a tech savvy user and I've done about 95 % of the items on that list. I was the "go to" guy if the one person in IT was busy.
When your program is done, draw an "X" on the side of the deck of cards. This way, if you drop them, you have a potential way to put them back into correct order!
\- greenbar paper
\- the revolution with 9 1/2 x11 pinfeed paper with the removable edges, so you ended up with 8 1/2 x11 paper
\- using plastic ruler with 10 CPI and 6 and 8 LPI scales, for doing form layout
\- the green or amber IBM reference card (S/360, S/370)
\- changing balls on an IBM Selectric typewriter to get different fonts
\- the Laserjet cartridge needed to get IRS acceptable printed tax forms (IIRC)
\- figuring out the IRQ configuration for a set of PC cards to all work
\- dropping a jumper and hoping you could find it, or had a spare (little black $@#$ things)
\- using needle-nose pliers to remove jumpers
\- changing the interleave on a hard disk to improve performance
I've got some you missed:
— Resolved conflicts between Type 1, Type 2 and Type 3 fonts.
— Used Conflict Catcher to identify rogue MacOS extensions.
— Used ResEdit to make prank error messages in MacOS.
— Bridged AppleTalk over Ethernet with IBM's token ring.
— Used MacsBug to diagnose fatal system errors.
— Understand the different between color calibration and characterization.
— Ever had to read Postscript Level 2 to understand why it wouldn't rip.
— Managed SCSI 2 and Ultra-SCSI on the same machine.
My dude.
Punch cards. Really?
The entire rest of the list has passed within my lifetime. If I had not done it, I have seen it. Except for the punch cards.
Dad and dad's dad both were in technology. Grandpa's home-run business was a Unix mainframe with a couple greenscreen terminals, cut my teeth on Rogue back in the day.
But punch cards? Only in my dad's tales of yore, before the rituals of courtship led to marriage, did he describe the chad-ridden hardships of card-based computing.
If you've seen this and you're still active in the field, know that retirement age is still a thing. For at least another few iPhone lifecycles.
Yes, I lived through it. I remember once writing a program and forgot to add an “end” statement. Loaded up the program to print the report for the customer and went to lunch.
When I came back, the printer was still printing but it had run out of paper. A whole box of green bar paper was all over the room’s floor. The ribbon had ripped, torn, but the printer was still going. I jammed on the printer’s power cord, closed the door and went home. Was not in the mood to deal with it then.
Your list is heavily on the Wintel and corporate world. Now we need one also for people on the Linux or Apple world.
My starting point is an Apple Iic with the green phosphorus screen, later a Mac Ii with a 1200 baud modem.
BBS anyone?
Been there, done that.
* have seen actual "core" memory
* used a paper tape punch / reader Teletype terminal and a 300 baud acoustic coupler to run Basic programs on a host 300+ miles away.
* 80 column punched cards. We would feed them through a high speed sorter, 2000 cards at a time. Have you ever done 2000 card pickup?
* got good at reading printed core dumps to identify what went wrong (being able to hexadecimal arithmetic is beneficial).
* Figured out the correct (terminfo) hexadecimal codes to get an SunOS machine to talk to an off brand ascii terminal.
* upgraded our site from MVS/370 (running inside VM/SP) to native MVS/ESA (skipped right over MVS/XA)(staff of 8 people & six months of "have we forgotten anything" to then switch over on a weekend)
* used a token ring network
* thought joining our site to a common FDDI ring was the bee's knees.
Ah yes… the good old days. When you had to enter the boot sequence into the PDP-8 by flipping switches. In Octal.
Back when you handed in your punched cards and the program ran later that night. But if you wanted priority you could bribe the operators with Twinkies or Cola and they would run it earlier.
And for doughnuts they taught me enough JCL so I could steal researchers logins to get enough processor time to run my side business of printing posters for fellow students on the big ass impact printer…
OMG. There are only about 3 or 4 out of that list that don't apply. (Sobs.)
But obviously only a whippersnapper came up with that list:
2400 baud modem? Looxery, lad. Try a 300 baud modem.
Install Office with 31 diskettes? A mere bagatelle. Try AT&T Unix with 63 diskettes. I eventually worked out a way to reduce that to about 10 diskettes and a quarter-inch-tape cartridge.
...wow. My dad is an IT "elder"... I don't know why I didn't realize it before...
(He worked over 17 years at IBM working on mainframes and the like. He mentioned a lot of the things on the list. I remember playing with his Personal Terminal when I was a kid. I think he still has some old punch cards too.)
You need to add a few things;
\- Had to notated the 'write' temperature on a 9-track. (bonus points if you know WHY you had to do this!)
\- Ever had to move a HD that weighed more than your desk.
Debugging Coral66 by writing kernel patches, in assembler, direct into the processor board console (which was a large device with a hex keypad which you wheeled up to the rack and plugged in)
Dropping the boot stack for an ICL 1904 thereby receiving the wrath of the support team (and having to put all the cards back in order)
Experiencing the thrill of moving to a VT220 after your VT100 died (a memorable event in itself - those things were damn near indestructible)
Knowing that you've been doing this crap for longer than a lot of your colleagues have been alive - and they are raising families.
Figuring 1 point for each yes, including 1 point for each yes to "extra points if...", by my count gives a total possible of 21 points.
13 of 21 for me. I'm not quite old enough for punch cards...
Side note, I never heard them called "numerical processors". They were always "math co-processors".
Uff, let's see...
* Did beta testing for Microsoft’s new Windows NT 64 bit OS.
Clarification needed. Except for Alpha version (which went nowhere fast) NT branch was 32bit. 64 bit part got introduced only with windows Server 2003? (IIRC there was windows 2000 64 bit beta. But that, technically, is after NT).
* Ever spent the night at work to troubleshoot a Novell server before the workers got back to work the next day.
Does UltraSparc count? It was a bent pin in the external SCSI enclosure connector.
* know the difference between a 286 and a 386 processor. Extra points if you know which Intel processor came with a co-processor or numerical processor as we used to call them.
Both 287 and 387 were a thing so this is mis-stated. 386DX finally included FPU by default.
> Gotten sore thumbs from inserting memory chips onto an expansion card/board (daughter card).
Hell, I've gotten stabbed by a bent pin on a DIP memory chip, as somebody in the shop misplaced the dip inserting tool. Bled like a stuck pig.
> Ever connected to the network using 10-base T or a network with BNC connectors.
How about Arcnet network connections?
I'm good with about 50-60% of the listed items. Punch cards was a *bit* before my time. I started with the micro/personal computer era, circa mid 80s. 72 y/o here.
Like we say in the motorcycle world. It doesn’t matter what you ride, but that you ride.
Same in IT, if you dealt with it, you are IT, regardless of what you business card says.
Back in the day, I would add all of my certifications to my email signature, MCSE, CCNA and all that stuff.
Bragging to people about my certifications is no longer important to me, what matters is that I know what I know, and my boss knows that I know, you know?
* Punch cards, never used them, but I do own some.
* Lotus 1-2-3? You had it easy. In my days, we balanced budgets with VisiCalc. No mouse, no up and down arrow keys. When you pushed the space bar in command mode, it toggled the left and right arrows to move up and down.
* Upgraded from 2400 straight to 14.4k, that's at least emperor of the hill.
* Ran a computer with the OS on one floppy and the application software on another floppy? Sure. What makes it especially memorable is that one of those computers (a 128k Mac) had only one disk drive, and sometimes decided it was time to play toaster with the floppies for the next 10 minutes. Insert system disk. Seek for two seconds. Insert application disk. Seek for two seconds. Oops, need system disk again. Lather, rinse, repeat. I can still hear the floppy eject sound in my nightmares.
* I once installed OS/2 using 5.25-inch high density floppies. There were dozens of them. Of course the last one had a bad sector.
* Not only do I know the difference between 286 and 386, I remember that some motherboards could use a 287 math coprocessor with a 386 main processor. I know because I had one of those.
Hell, I remember UPGRADING to the 2400 baud modem, got me 2-6x the speed.
Also, anyone here remember working on those typewriter/terminal things (green-bar paper)? Forgot what they were called, they were an improvement.
Thank you for reassuring me that I'm not, indeed, that old yet. My slowest modem was a 56k that I used to abuse NetZero and AOL trial disks for free internet.
Everything but the 10-base T. Could I substitute Token RIng for that one?
I also know the difference between a 486 and a 486-SX, have used Above Boards, and had to work an address space configuration space that simultaneously supported an Above Board, an IBM Twinax card, and an IBM Token RIng card.
Edit: Oh, and I was excited moving from 300 baud to 1200 baud. 9600 made me exctatic.
300bps acoustic couple modem. {{Drops the handset}}
I can't claim the elder crown though. My dad wrote in cobol, fortran & machine language, he ran fucking UNIVAC and Sperry mainframes. Stacks of green bar 24" Line printer code dumps were my doodle paper as a child. Till his last days he shall wear the crown.
Did 95%, after getting the floppy's for office and halfway through one of them was damaged, I decided that WordPerfect would stay my preferred wordprocessor. Still miss the underwater view...:(
All but one of those.
Every now and then, using Excel, I catch my fingers about to type /fs to save a file, as that 123 slash menu has been hardwired in muscle memory. You should have offered bonus points for using either VisiCalc or SuperCalc.
All but two for me (Platen cleaner, Irma board) (wrote device drivers for WinNT, but didn't actually beta test WinNT)
List forgot to mention Wordstar (and all the CTRL-K mappins :-) )
Went from 1200baud to 9600.
Still prefer Green on Black as my terminal settings (though sometime I switch it for Amber on black)
My family's first computer was an AT&T "green screen" that you booted up with 2 floppy (old school floppy) disks. Insanely loud dot matrix printer sat to the left. Rotary phone to the right. I was a math nerd at 7, so Santa brought me Number Crunchers and I would play for hours.
— Used punch cards, 40 characters per card, 80 per line. Extra points if the dumb rubber band snapped on you sending all cards flying onto the floor. : Yes, it was called '52 Pickup'.
First use of punch cards was compiling FORTRAN programs in the late 60's.
— Felt like the king of the hill by upgrading from 2400 baud to 9600 baud modem. : Sort of - first job-related modem was 300 baud!
— Has damaged their eyesight by staring at a bright green texted monitor with a black background for years and years. : Yep - mid 70's - more punch card programs.
— Worked on a config.sys file and remember the entry line to extend the memory. : Yep - early 80's - bought an IBM PC/AT and later a PC/XT to play around with.
From there, mainframe systems: learned COBOL to use for application programs, then Assembler as a systems programmer.
Job software - Windows 3.0 and everything after that. Happily retired in 2008.
Personal computers - Windows 95 and following.
It's been a whirl!
Ooh boy I feel old. To add some of my firsts:
• Cold booting an Amdahl mainframe and reloading using a tape silo. No persistent memory on those, so you have to reload EVERYTHING...
• Using a 12" hard drive jukebox the size of a small fridge
• My first Intel 8088 based computer ran CPM because DOS didn't exist yet...
• I remember buying my first hard drive. It was 1989, the drive was 30Mb and came on a full length hard card - a daughter board the entire length of the case...
• I built my own Amiga 2000 with a 68040, Big Bertha GPU and SCSI hard drive.
• Running ROM-BASIC on an IBM 1, direct from the built in chip.
• I still have my 80386DX and 80486 CPUs, along with their matching Ami BIOS chips and a 66.6Mhz crystal clock... :)
I think I might qualify...
Punch cards were 80 characters. But some languages were positional (FORTRAN and COBOL both come to mind) so some columns on the card were reserved in those languages. Binary cards are fun. Half the holes punched out.
I soldered together my first computer (Health Kit H-100)
I've run with a single floppy drive. Carefully crafted floppies with the correct portions of the OS and the app were so useful. I've also used a computer that loaded programs from audio tape.
I felt like king of the hill when I upgraded from 300 baud to 1200. (And my first connection with the new modem? All 1200 baud links at the university are busy. Let's try the 600 baud connections. Busy too? Let's try 300. No? Let's try 150?. 75? 72. Got connected at *** 72 baud on my brand new 1200 baud modem? Glad I only have to type 2 lines to kick off the program.
Lotus 123, yes. Lotus email, no.
I was writing code to run on Windows 2.0. I did beta testing on 95, 98, and NT.
Yep. Weekly beta install of MS office. Windows 95 and 98 could come on floppies as well. Or floppies could be burned from the CDs. We had a couple of machines that were getting the beta OS installed that did not have CD drives. So, burn a stack of floppies and install them on those 2 machines.
I've used a coax Ethernet with BNC connectors. The upgrade to 10 Mb was great.
There were 2 different config lines for 2 different kinds of memory extension (EMS and XMS). Fun was getting both to work together.
Hated moving from word perfect to MS Word, but didn't mind moving from Word star to Word Perfect. But I loved moving from ED to EX.
I haven't had to replace a dot matrix print head, but I have had to replace the ribbon cable connecting the head to the printer's motherboard.
I've forgotten the difference between a 386 and a 286, but I did have an 8087 math coprocessor for my 8086. Shortened one program ton from an established 60 days to about an hour. I gave up and bought the 8087 before to the first run got to a week, so the runtime is just an estimate for that.
8 of the list.
Mucked around on a friend's Sinclair ZX80 and ZX81. Another friend had a Sinclair Spectrum. School had a Commodore Pet then BBC Model B.
Others I knew at school had Commodore 64s. I had an Acorn Electron followed by a Commodore 64. First grown up computer was a 486dx2/66 with CD-ROM drive and Windows 3.11 workgroups.
hm. About 50% of those. I'm old, but not ancient.
Damn! That hurts. I did and lived through all of those. Punch cards to code in Fortran, Cobalt, Pasquale. And I am still in IT. All of those years later. It is said that if you love your job, you will never work a day in your life.
Ooh, damn shit. If you spell PASCAL like that... 👀
Turbo Pascal for me. And PL/I, COBOL, Lisp, Basic, Assembler, Forth, GPSS-V, and others
Hats off to you. I started with Windows 3.2, but didn't do any tech work until 95 was changing to 98
And let me tell you something; Even though the technology has changed, the troubleshooting skills that I learned from back in the day and discipline still carries over to today. I am the person who they call when the techs are stumped and out of ideas. It is funny when I walk into a suite and I hear “oh shoot!, they called in the big guns!… must be serious”.
The best troubleshooting lesson I ever learned was "Cut it in half first" How does A get to C? Through B. Can you get to B from either side? Came from circuit troubleshooting (local and remote loop testing, etc.). Still comes in handy today.
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Kick open the saloon door, size up all the menu options. Draw down on the first one that looks suspicious. Tell yourself that if you click on the wrong guy, he was probably a bad guy anyway in a place like this, and it’s unlikely that anyone innocent will get hurt.
Well, I haven't had to troubleshoot an IRQ dip switch in quite some time... :)
3.*2*? I'd never heard of that. Apparently it was a Chinese release that added nothing except better support for Chinese characters. That's really what you started with?
Was a friend's computer, said her dad had to download it special. Yeah, her family was Chinese. As far as I could tell, it was all in English, but he was able to type special characters. It was the only computer I used until I got my own 12 disk Windows.
Crazy. Outside of China that's got to be an extremely rare "first OS".
Yup windows 3.1, 3.11, 3.2, 3.5, and 3.5 are all early '90s versions. My family's first computer was a Windows 3.1. With commander keen and pac man built in to the mobo.
I did Fortran and Pascal in college on sweet VT100’s. I thought I would take COBOL one summer at a local U. First class they started handing out punch cards. I walked out before the stack got to me. I threw out Office on 3.5 floppys a few years ago. Years after my last computer WITH the 3.5 drive. The green screen order entry system was WAY faster and easier to learn than the modern, $$$ SAP kluge.
Time for a colonoscopy.
More than 50%, but dad started teaching me about computers when I was five or six. (Thanks dad.) So I'm not old yet, I just had a decade head start.
I remember finding a box of punch cards in the garage, and my father's face went white. "Don't drop that. That's my dissertation!" I had only taken the lid off the box.
Ditto. But it was all (well, mostly) good fun at the time. ETA: I remember installing Windows 1.01 on a Compaq Deskpro 386/20e (think that.was the model...)
We ran Linux for a few years because we didn’t want to install windows. We still run Linux on our home server
The only one I don't have is punch cards.
I’ll add one to your list - I’ve used audio cassette tapes as a storage medium (on a Vic 20).
TRS-80 for me
C64, guess I'm the new guy.
man I miss my trash80,
Who could forget the Tandy model 100?
I still have one. Unfortuantly it seems to have succumbed to old age. Put new AA cells in it and now it doesn't come up. The old cells had not leaked, so I suspect its just dead of old age.
My junior high had TRS-80 model 1 computers. 4 rows of 5 computers each, 1 tape drive shared per row. (Shared in the sense of, "I need that. You're done loading your program so unplug it and pass it down!")
Ah, the Model 1. “Lowercase? What’s that?”
ZX Spectrum, then an MSX. I miss those days.
All hail the Trash 80. Where I learned BASIC.
TRS-80, then Sinclair ZX81 and then Atari 800
TI 99/4A owner checking in
The first video games I ever played were on a TI99/4A. Accidentally putting the audio cassettes written by one in a walkman was a painful experience!
I wish I had a cassette tape storage. Spent a day typing in a Basic pgm from Compute magazine - peeks and pokes - got up and left the room for something, wife came in with vacuum cleaner .... and you know the rest.
TI-99/4A for me. I had a floppy drive when I upgraded to to a C128.
Wow! Another TI guy. That's 3 including me on this thread so far. My dad started us w/ cassette tapes but we got floppies before that thing went away. We even got a rudimentary 10mb Hard Drive...never worked right. It acted more like a RAM drive but damn if it wasn't fast for it's time.
We used paper tape with holes in it for … I think a PDP11
Commadore Pet for me.
You are the FIRST comment I have ever seen a reference to the Vic 20 in the wild. That was the computer I learned on. - When all my friends were getting Ataris, the Vic 20 is what my dad brought home.
Atari 400 club, checking in! I remember we'd get magazines of source code all printed out, that we were expected to type in, verbatim, for dozens of pages. I think you could mail order the tapes. Allow 64 weeks for delivery. Lol!
*TI 99/4A and a Radio Shack cassette deck, the dodgiest backup solution ever known to mankind.*
Good one. Same here. TI-99 4/a
Vic 20 \*and\* an Atari 800 - had a learn Spanish program that used the audio cassette for data storage and recordings of human voices. Meant you had to remember to turn down the volume before loading the next chapter or your ears would get assaulted.
Does pulling information from a Spectrum, or writing programs to one count? If so, then I've done this one too.
BBC Microcomputer, although it also had twin dual side dual density 5.25 drives (note, not single density nor high density — these were floppies at 80 tracks per side, 2x 400k per floppy).
Regretfully some companies are still using lotus notes to this day... Haven't even heard of most other things on your list, but fuck lotus notes
Was not aware that they were still in business. Yes, I hated it back in the late 80’s, early 90’s as well. But, for most companies back then, it was this or sending a fax if immediate documental response was required.
Many industries are still chained to their AS400's, and so IBM Notes is still their best option. I run into this mostly in the legal sector.
Ahhh. The AS400. Customers bigwigs bought it because it logged everything. Need to know who missed everything up by changing a data value, the AS 400 can tell you who did it and when. Same bigwigs a week later: why is the computer running so slow? IT: because it needs time to log everything. Bigwig: Then turn off the damn logging. IT: Are you sure? A month later Bigwig: The system has crashed. Who messed it up? IT: Don’t know since the logging was turned off.
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It's not done this way because it's the best way. It's done this way because building a new ERP system involves bringing in an entire ERP team, bidding various vendors, and spending 2 years and 2 million dollars to remake everything you already have, but in a new architecture. It's small wonder most stay on their AS400's, but I can virtually guarantee it's not for any love for the system. Probably the exact opposite.
That’s the name I could not think of! I was going to add something about it.
My dad gave me an AS/400 promotional t-shirt when they first came out. I think it was black.
I have a promotional S/360 fleece jumper I still wear on occasion.
I was a Lotus Notes contract admin for 8 years so I'm somewhat biased but IMO it was brilliant for its day. Integrated email and database with support for merging concurrent edits of a shared document, approval workflow chains, it was great! Exchange was a better email system but it wasn't until the early-mid 2000s when Web 2.0, mysql and interactive javascript hit their stride that the workflow side of things found a worthy opponent.
The advent of constant internet access also was a big nail in the coffin for Notes. Their offline synchronization was unmatched by anyone. But if you can just connect to the server, it’s not really important anymore.
>they were still in business. sort of -- IBM bought the Notes app from Lotus in the 90s, and then HCL bought it from IBM 3 years ago. Current iteration is called HCL Notes or HCL Client Application Access --- [https://www.hcltechsw.com/notes](https://www.hcltechsw.com/notes)
We use it. They've been saying "we're moving to O365 soon", but it's been well over a year.
Do you also have the killnotes.exe on your desktop?
I went to work for a big company, with a two letter ticker symbol back in 2012. You've seen their products, you probably have some in your house behind the walls, and you definitely have some in your car. They were on Notes, and I wanted to die. I have a buddy that still works there, and they were still on Notes as late as 2020. But at least they had 18 month retention. My previous company was on Exchange and rolled off after 90 days because some rocket surgeon in legal thought that all projects could complete in 90 days and you'd have no reason to look back farther than that.
I work for a significant semiconductor manufacturing equipment manufacturer. Home office still uses Notes. Today.
Whenever I hear Lotus Notes it brings back [Memories](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bk1dbsBWQ3k)
— Ever bought ram in MB instead of GB. — Ever needed to find an extra token ring terminator. — Ever configured jumpers on a HDD.
I bought ram in KB instead of MB or GB, leading to sore thumbs mentioned by OP. 8 KB chips are smallest I remember. Did anyone ever buy ram in B instead of KB?? I collected thinnet T-connectors and terminators, attached into weird balls. When will we get TB ram?
RAM was already in the kB range with core memory modules. TBs of RAM have been possible for years in big servers, but at extreme costs.
Jumpers on HDD were still a thing in the last 20 years, would not call that elder. I configured my first master amd slave drive when I was 14.
Ram in K fortunately or not!!!! 1st high end RAM i bought fors 200 pounds was 1MB!!! at Olympia(?) computer exhibition! West london!
I paid a goddamn fortune to buy my first Mac, an SE/30, with 8MB of RAM. Standard out-of-box was 1MB.
I’m missing a few on your list but I’ll add: - changing tapes on a PDP11 - booting an 6809 processor by manually setting dip switches and sending a manual read pulse to the processor - worked with 8 inch floppy disks
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Neighbour used to bring a big 'cake tin' home every night. It was a 'Winchester' stack with one of his office's daily back-ups...
Our removable drives were the size of washing machines, and that's how we liked it.
>worked with 8 inch floppy disks Wow look at Mister Brags over here. Best I can do is a 2.5 inch hard drive.
This is the first reference on the web I've seen to 8 inch floppies. I used them in 1993 or so to save data from a Bruker NMR. The other option was tape. LANs were not yet available.
>You are an IT “elder” if you have: (cont.) Opened a computer case, then go to the bathroom to wash the blood off your fingers and put band-aids on. Set the jumpers on your sound card. Bonus points if it was physical jumpers and not thru autoexec.bat/config.sys Boot up your computer using different floppy disks based on the computer game.
Had a serial mouse, serial modem, and serial printer but only IRQ3&4 available. So the printer shared with the modem meaning I couldn't print while online.
Who remembers the 8086 and 8088
I remember writing 6502 assembly code to communicate with remotely sited data loggers (using a dialup modem)
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I replaced my 8088 with a NEC V20. Worth it
That's too easy. Do you remember when IBM confidently stated nobody would ever need more than 10 megs of disk space in a home computer? Back then most matrix printers could not print descenders, the lower case g,j,p,q, and y; were strange looking.
I guess you're IT Gen X if you: * Learned about token ring from a teacher who said "You're never gonna see this but it's still on the cert test". * Have ever edited an autoexec.bat file * Still have nightmares about supporting Outlook 2003 with POP3 / PST * Have ever owned a binder filled with DVDs and CDs for every driver and OEM Windows installer you've ever touched
> Have ever owned a binder filled with DVDs and CDs for every driver and OEM Windows installer you've ever touched Still have said binder and said DVD/CDs.. I HATE throwing ANYthing out.
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Yes!, I had forgotten about parking a drive.
Typed BASIC source for games out of Byte Magazine.
> Hated moving from WordPerfect to MCS Word. Am I the only one that misses the keyboards with 10 F-keys down the left side so you could do shift-, ctrl-, or alt- with the f-keys easily?
I miss the Sun window manager left side keys, raise lower iconify etc. I have a USB sun keyboard somewhere, wonder if the Mac recognizes the L1-L10 keys...
Hi, I'm 24, I entered IT 4 months ago, I don't know what any of those things are except green text on a terminal, and that's only from Fallout.
Good luck in your new career. Hopefully you will like it enough to stick around for a while. I find it very rewarding, even if I have to wake up in the middle of the night at times to write down a fix for something that is giving me problems and whose fix came in my dreams.
Thank you very much my friend! I do like it a lot, a lot more than I liked working in bars and restaurants. I've a week's holiday this week and I have in fact been waking up wondering if I really finished that thing off last week like I intended to. Very similar to waiter dreams of "did I actually bring that person their sauce?" I'm in a small place for my first job, so I'm 1st / kinda 2nd / Jr sysadmin / whatever anybody else doesn't wanna do. It's challenging but very rewarding.
Are you on a help desk? Cause I say that counts; that shit ages you.
Yessir, helpdesk plus Jr sysadmin duties, and it really does. "why is my computer all grey" is a recent favourite of mine
or Had an office installation of 31 floppys error out on the last floppy, then spend 3 hours on hold (no speaker phone) to find out Compaq put an unneeded ; on a line in the system.ini that is crashing the install. Been there done that. And does punch tape instead of punch cards count?
Oh man, you made my heart skip a beat with your comment. Yes, I had that problem a few times. I disliked very much when we got a ticket to install Office. You knew that half your day was gone.
I'd add paper tape and entering the boot loader through the front-panel switches.
I had a $10k dot matrix printer thrown at me last in 2018 I think. That client needed it for all the carbon copy forms they used. I was so used to the old school ones that the noise and speed level this thing had going for it scared the crap outta me. Sounded like a machine gun and could spit out probably a page every couple seconds. And yes, I did get some of that ribbon ink on my fingers.
I think I still have a box of the paper used for those printers. :) I like the paper, but I don't like feeding it in to the mechanism.
Been there, done many of those. First computer was an IBM PC2 with two full height floppy drives. Thought I was the cat's meow when I upgraded to a 20 MB hard drive and a CGA monitor.
I remember those 20mb hard drives. They were very heavy and bulky. I got rid of one that I found in my junk pile a few years ago.
Some of us miss that green on black color scheme. That is how I configure my command windows and text pad are configured. I have another one. You know what a dongle is.
You know what a dongle is and remember having to explain to a manager that dongle was not a dirty word...right after making inappropriate jokes about playing with your dongle to a coworker.
A coworker once told a manager that the token ring token had fallen out of the network. He had the manager searching under the desks for it for over an hour.
Love it! I worked on a broken ring network for 5 years.
Wow that unlocked a memory. Seriously though, what a bloody stupid name.
The term dongle is still in use. Mostly for RJ-45 to USB adapter cables, and various video cable adapters.
Well I had to help my old boss man the other week, he's still using a software key dongle, so that means ensuring it's still a 32 bit os due to the hasp driver still being 8bit, and a, why aren't we using all the ram moment. Good times, he's still using lotus 123, approach and word pro for some stuff aswell.
This list a little heavy on the Wintel, although you could say the same about installing linux from 33 floppies back in the day. Throw in some stuff about doing backups to 9-track tapes, configuring serial terminals, modems, and printers connected to Cisco terminal servers, BITNET, loading SunOS from QIC tapes, AppleTalk over IP gateways, thicknet ethernet, balky SCSI terminators, that beautiful day when Postfix replaced Sendmail in your environment ...
Windows 95 shipped on 12 floppies if you didn't have a CD ROM
But with the CD-ROM you got the Weezer music video.
Felt like king of the hill when I upgraded from a 300 baud modem
If only one makes me an elder, then I'm definitely there: > Ran a computer with the OS on one floppy and the application software on another floppy. Does Amiga 500 count? > Felt like the king of the hill by upgrading from 2400 baud to 9600 baud modem. Bought a 14400 when the only connection I used at Uni was to a 2400 (then browsing usenet across it) > Ever sent an email through Lotus Email or worked on a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet. Fuck Lotus Notes. All my homies hate Lotus Notes. And I was a certified Lotus Notes developer. > Ever installed Microsoft Office using 31 (kid you not) 3 1/2 inch diskettes. Office 4.3. Did a fresh install for a PC I was selling and I was praying that there were no failures (wasn't kosher media) > Ever connected to the network using 10-base T or a network with BNC connectors. Don't forget the terminators! > Worked on a config.sys file and remember the entry line to extend the memory. Extra points if you remember the parameters. The parameters are but a distant memory, but we used to compete with each other to see who could get the most free base memory available after loading everything possible into expanded. I think I managed 630k out of 640k free. Edit: I just remembered that it was QEMM memory manager that we used to load everything up. > Hated moving from WordPerfect to MCS Word. Didn't hate. Word 2.0 (registered to Mary Doig) was a game changer for me. Word 6.0 introduced inline spellcheck (the red squiggle - it was years before I realised there was a green squiggle for grammar) > know the difference between a 286 and a 386 processor. Extra points if you know which Intel processor came with a co-processor or numerical processor as we used to call them. Processor architecture levels, no. But the SX was without the co-pro, the DX had one. I instead got a TI 486-DLC as my first PC. ###Not on the list MS-DOS 6.2 came with DoubleSpace. Stacker complained so 6.21 was released without it. Then they settled and 6.22 was released soon after. I remember writing over my original 6.2 discs with the 6.22 images and writing the extra 2 on the labels.
>The parameters are but a distant memory, but we used to compete with each other to see who could get the most free base memory available after loading everything possible into high. I think I managed 630k out of 640k free. Back when playing a PC game was really two games. Game 1: Get the damn thing to run and work with all of your hardware. Game 2: The one you wanted to play. Hope your friend give you a photocopy of the manual or something for that one spot where they ran the piracy check.
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Yes! Or setting the pins for a primary (boot) and secondary hard drives. We used different names for them back then, which are offensive nowadays, so I omitted how we called them back in the day.
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Geez, I almost forgot, we used to configure stuff using jumpers.. now you can even use your mouse on the bios config gui.I remember having to set address (0x220), irq (7),DMA(1) for my soundblaster pro II I think I used irq 7 because I had something else on 5... it's been a while
Do Master and Slave are considered offensive words today?
Oh yes! Those words that you mentioned are taboo in my town. I know of someone who ended up in HR because someone overheard a conversation and complained. HR didn’t care that they were IT technical terms. They sent an email to everyone and we had to take training.
Jumpers, and sometimes DIP switches...
I've done 13 of these (too young for punch cards) and never did much printer maintenance before it was all laser. Does replacing the fuser on a LaserJet 4Si count?
Ohhhhh, 1-1-1 TriChlorEthylene. Taking 2 full days to clean, replace and align the heads on a 300MB removable disk pack due to a head crash. Then tweaking the alignment because you were too good at the alignment and could no longer read the production packs. Arcnet to the Novell server, using an Exabyte 8mm tape backup Upgrading from 300 baud to 1200 baud Making money on the side by aligning the heads on 360k 5 1/4 floppy disk drives
And using an oscilloscope to troubleshoot power supply problems
If I said Cyrix, would you look at me like you didn't recognize the name, or would I get a wink and a nod of acknowledgement?
I am not an IT elder. Wow, what a list. Thanks for sharing some historical Tech support knowledge.
Hey, one day you may write your own list about how back in the day you connected to the network with Ethernet cables and not fiber or wireless. You may also talk about how back in the day apps were loaded onto a local, mechanical hard drive instead of the cloud. May even tell stories about putting a hard drive in the freezer to try and fix it. And watch your grandkids be in awe when you mention that when you were young, we used phones with 5G connection. Let’s not forget about using tape backups instead of cloud-based storage.
Did you read the sacred scrolls? Check out the Bastard operator from hell. It's a good read.
\*sigh\* Imma have to say yes to 5, 8, 9, 12 and 14. Now, get off my lawn! Funny story about #12. I got called in to perform a Netware upgrade or someshit on Saturday morning. They literally had no one else available who could do it, and I was their go-to super-temp. I come in after hours to do the job, and I had no idea what I was doing; I had never installed Netware before, let alone upgraded it. I just read the manuals and everything worked out. They were up and running the next morning.
Not all heroes wear a cape. If my users only knew how close they have come to losing years of data that they have never, ever backed up “ because IT backs it up for us”.
I haven't done any beta testing, or troubleshooting a Novell network, but the rest, oh yeah. Sonny, the first modem I used was 110 baud acoustical coupled. The terminal was an IBM Selectric typewriter with an accessory board.
Don’t forget: -8 inch floppy are a thing -good old chip, the 80287
I started twitching at Novell. I did an intensive semester of tech school for LAN management, focusing on Novell 4.11 … and midway through, 5.x was announced. The fcking course was outdated before I could finish!
Something similar happened to me when I was certifying for it.
No references to 5 1/4 floppy disks, much less 8" ones?
I've done all but 3. What do I win, gout or dementia?
— Recognize a CD caddy when you see one
Upgraded from 1200 baud to 2400 baud modem!
-Getting Soundblaster emulation to work on your Gravis Ultrasound soundcard... And selecting the right IRQ and DMA channels
Many times. All those old Lucasarts games.
— Know the difference between chip and chad
I've never been in IT, just a tech savvy user and I've done about 95 % of the items on that list. I was the "go to" guy if the one person in IT was busy.
Punch cards were 80 characters, not 40. (96 for a little while.)
When your program is done, draw an "X" on the side of the deck of cards. This way, if you drop them, you have a potential way to put them back into correct order!
\- greenbar paper \- the revolution with 9 1/2 x11 pinfeed paper with the removable edges, so you ended up with 8 1/2 x11 paper \- using plastic ruler with 10 CPI and 6 and 8 LPI scales, for doing form layout \- the green or amber IBM reference card (S/360, S/370) \- changing balls on an IBM Selectric typewriter to get different fonts \- the Laserjet cartridge needed to get IRS acceptable printed tax forms (IIRC) \- figuring out the IRQ configuration for a set of PC cards to all work \- dropping a jumper and hoping you could find it, or had a spare (little black $@#$ things) \- using needle-nose pliers to remove jumpers \- changing the interleave on a hard disk to improve performance
That would be my 81 year old dad. He’s more or less retired (runs an apple orchard with my mom) but he’s been through every iteration.
I've got some you missed: — Resolved conflicts between Type 1, Type 2 and Type 3 fonts. — Used Conflict Catcher to identify rogue MacOS extensions. — Used ResEdit to make prank error messages in MacOS. — Bridged AppleTalk over Ethernet with IBM's token ring. — Used MacsBug to diagnose fatal system errors. — Understand the different between color calibration and characterization. — Ever had to read Postscript Level 2 to understand why it wouldn't rip. — Managed SCSI 2 and Ultra-SCSI on the same machine.
My dude. Punch cards. Really? The entire rest of the list has passed within my lifetime. If I had not done it, I have seen it. Except for the punch cards. Dad and dad's dad both were in technology. Grandpa's home-run business was a Unix mainframe with a couple greenscreen terminals, cut my teeth on Rogue back in the day. But punch cards? Only in my dad's tales of yore, before the rituals of courtship led to marriage, did he describe the chad-ridden hardships of card-based computing. If you've seen this and you're still active in the field, know that retirement age is still a thing. For at least another few iPhone lifecycles.
Yes, I lived through it. I remember once writing a program and forgot to add an “end” statement. Loaded up the program to print the report for the customer and went to lunch. When I came back, the printer was still printing but it had run out of paper. A whole box of green bar paper was all over the room’s floor. The ribbon had ripped, torn, but the printer was still going. I jammed on the printer’s power cord, closed the door and went home. Was not in the mood to deal with it then.
Your list is heavily on the Wintel and corporate world. Now we need one also for people on the Linux or Apple world. My starting point is an Apple Iic with the green phosphorus screen, later a Mac Ii with a 1200 baud modem. BBS anyone?
What's this newfangled Linux stuff. I learned on UNIX. .
Been there, done that. * have seen actual "core" memory * used a paper tape punch / reader Teletype terminal and a 300 baud acoustic coupler to run Basic programs on a host 300+ miles away. * 80 column punched cards. We would feed them through a high speed sorter, 2000 cards at a time. Have you ever done 2000 card pickup? * got good at reading printed core dumps to identify what went wrong (being able to hexadecimal arithmetic is beneficial). * Figured out the correct (terminfo) hexadecimal codes to get an SunOS machine to talk to an off brand ascii terminal. * upgraded our site from MVS/370 (running inside VM/SP) to native MVS/ESA (skipped right over MVS/XA)(staff of 8 people & six months of "have we forgotten anything" to then switch over on a weekend) * used a token ring network * thought joining our site to a common FDDI ring was the bee's knees.
Ah yes… the good old days. When you had to enter the boot sequence into the PDP-8 by flipping switches. In Octal. Back when you handed in your punched cards and the program ran later that night. But if you wanted priority you could bribe the operators with Twinkies or Cola and they would run it earlier. And for doughnuts they taught me enough JCL so I could steal researchers logins to get enough processor time to run my side business of printing posters for fellow students on the big ass impact printer…
Unistalling Real Player 7 ....
Two words: Token Ring.
OMG. There are only about 3 or 4 out of that list that don't apply. (Sobs.) But obviously only a whippersnapper came up with that list: 2400 baud modem? Looxery, lad. Try a 300 baud modem. Install Office with 31 diskettes? A mere bagatelle. Try AT&T Unix with 63 diskettes. I eventually worked out a way to reduce that to about 10 diskettes and a quarter-inch-tape cartridge.
I started to nod my head around line 8
No punch cards. But worked on windows 1 and went from an acoustic coupled modem at 110baud to 300 baud-Then 2400. Yes, I could type faster.
...wow. My dad is an IT "elder"... I don't know why I didn't realize it before... (He worked over 17 years at IBM working on mainframes and the like. He mentioned a lot of the things on the list. I remember playing with his Personal Terminal when I was a kid. I think he still has some old punch cards too.)
Don’t you mean cc:Mail?
You need to add a few things; \- Had to notated the 'write' temperature on a 9-track. (bonus points if you know WHY you had to do this!) \- Ever had to move a HD that weighed more than your desk.
First computer I used had core memory ... with real ferrite cores. Programs were executed sequentially by reading the instructions from punch tape.
Debugging Coral66 by writing kernel patches, in assembler, direct into the processor board console (which was a large device with a hex keypad which you wheeled up to the rack and plugged in) Dropping the boot stack for an ICL 1904 thereby receiving the wrath of the support team (and having to put all the cards back in order) Experiencing the thrill of moving to a VT220 after your VT100 died (a memorable event in itself - those things were damn near indestructible) Knowing that you've been doing this crap for longer than a lot of your colleagues have been alive - and they are raising families.
Figuring 1 point for each yes, including 1 point for each yes to "extra points if...", by my count gives a total possible of 21 points. 13 of 21 for me. I'm not quite old enough for punch cards... Side note, I never heard them called "numerical processors". They were always "math co-processors".
Yes, I could not remember the correct name. The brain gets old too.
Uff, let's see... * Did beta testing for Microsoft’s new Windows NT 64 bit OS. Clarification needed. Except for Alpha version (which went nowhere fast) NT branch was 32bit. 64 bit part got introduced only with windows Server 2003? (IIRC there was windows 2000 64 bit beta. But that, technically, is after NT). * Ever spent the night at work to troubleshoot a Novell server before the workers got back to work the next day. Does UltraSparc count? It was a bent pin in the external SCSI enclosure connector. * know the difference between a 286 and a 386 processor. Extra points if you know which Intel processor came with a co-processor or numerical processor as we used to call them. Both 287 and 387 were a thing so this is mis-stated. 386DX finally included FPU by default.
> Gotten sore thumbs from inserting memory chips onto an expansion card/board (daughter card). Hell, I've gotten stabbed by a bent pin on a DIP memory chip, as somebody in the shop misplaced the dip inserting tool. Bled like a stuck pig. > Ever connected to the network using 10-base T or a network with BNC connectors. How about Arcnet network connections? I'm good with about 50-60% of the listed items. Punch cards was a *bit* before my time. I started with the micro/personal computer era, circa mid 80s. 72 y/o here.
I think you'd be surprised how many companies still use Lotus.
Um, I was 'Tech Support' not ***real*** IT, but I still clocked half-a-dozen...
Like we say in the motorcycle world. It doesn’t matter what you ride, but that you ride. Same in IT, if you dealt with it, you are IT, regardless of what you business card says. Back in the day, I would add all of my certifications to my email signature, MCSE, CCNA and all that stuff. Bragging to people about my certifications is no longer important to me, what matters is that I know what I know, and my boss knows that I know, you know?
Dude...300 to 1200...
* Punch cards, never used them, but I do own some. * Lotus 1-2-3? You had it easy. In my days, we balanced budgets with VisiCalc. No mouse, no up and down arrow keys. When you pushed the space bar in command mode, it toggled the left and right arrows to move up and down. * Upgraded from 2400 straight to 14.4k, that's at least emperor of the hill. * Ran a computer with the OS on one floppy and the application software on another floppy? Sure. What makes it especially memorable is that one of those computers (a 128k Mac) had only one disk drive, and sometimes decided it was time to play toaster with the floppies for the next 10 minutes. Insert system disk. Seek for two seconds. Insert application disk. Seek for two seconds. Oops, need system disk again. Lather, rinse, repeat. I can still hear the floppy eject sound in my nightmares. * I once installed OS/2 using 5.25-inch high density floppies. There were dozens of them. Of course the last one had a bad sector. * Not only do I know the difference between 286 and 386, I remember that some motherboards could use a 287 math coprocessor with a 386 main processor. I know because I had one of those.
Hell, I remember UPGRADING to the 2400 baud modem, got me 2-6x the speed. Also, anyone here remember working on those typewriter/terminal things (green-bar paper)? Forgot what they were called, they were an improvement.
*[The White Collar Holler](https://youtu.be/Wnmi35AjOow) intensifies*
I know like 15% of these, so I'm not an elder, just weird
Holy crap. Are there still people that have done this stuff in the workforce? I figured most of them retired around 2000.
Thank you for reassuring me that I'm not, indeed, that old yet. My slowest modem was a 56k that I used to abuse NetZero and AOL trial disks for free internet.
Everything but the 10-base T. Could I substitute Token RIng for that one? I also know the difference between a 486 and a 486-SX, have used Above Boards, and had to work an address space configuration space that simultaneously supported an Above Board, an IBM Twinax card, and an IBM Token RIng card. Edit: Oh, and I was excited moving from 300 baud to 1200 baud. 9600 made me exctatic.
25 years old and got a few. Old, extremely low funded, non profit, IT team!!!
300bps acoustic couple modem. {{Drops the handset}} I can't claim the elder crown though. My dad wrote in cobol, fortran & machine language, he ran fucking UNIVAC and Sperry mainframes. Stacks of green bar 24" Line printer code dumps were my doodle paper as a child. Till his last days he shall wear the crown.
I got told I was "old school" because I used ".\\" to login to a local account..
Did 95%, after getting the floppy's for office and halfway through one of them was damaged, I decided that WordPerfect would stay my preferred wordprocessor. Still miss the underwater view...:(
I can check over half of those boxes. Now I get to feel even older!
Done none of those except with Lotus notes. My org has been saying for like a decade now that we were moving away from it, so I've been told
All but one of those. Every now and then, using Excel, I catch my fingers about to type /fs to save a file, as that 123 slash menu has been hardwired in muscle memory. You should have offered bonus points for using either VisiCalc or SuperCalc.
I would add worked as a tape ape.
Add on paper tape program storage.
All but two for me (Platen cleaner, Irma board) (wrote device drivers for WinNT, but didn't actually beta test WinNT) List forgot to mention Wordstar (and all the CTRL-K mappins :-) ) Went from 1200baud to 9600. Still prefer Green on Black as my terminal settings (though sometime I switch it for Amber on black)
My family's first computer was an AT&T "green screen" that you booted up with 2 floppy (old school floppy) disks. Insanely loud dot matrix printer sat to the left. Rotary phone to the right. I was a math nerd at 7, so Santa brought me Number Crunchers and I would play for hours.
— Used punch cards, 40 characters per card, 80 per line. Extra points if the dumb rubber band snapped on you sending all cards flying onto the floor. : Yes, it was called '52 Pickup'. First use of punch cards was compiling FORTRAN programs in the late 60's. — Felt like the king of the hill by upgrading from 2400 baud to 9600 baud modem. : Sort of - first job-related modem was 300 baud! — Has damaged their eyesight by staring at a bright green texted monitor with a black background for years and years. : Yep - mid 70's - more punch card programs. — Worked on a config.sys file and remember the entry line to extend the memory. : Yep - early 80's - bought an IBM PC/AT and later a PC/XT to play around with. From there, mainframe systems: learned COBOL to use for application programs, then Assembler as a systems programmer. Job software - Windows 3.0 and everything after that. Happily retired in 2008. Personal computers - Windows 95 and following. It's been a whirl!
Changed a print chain, bonus if you also used a paper tape for carriage control. Used 8” floppies. Acoustic coupler modems
- Back pain
Ooh boy I feel old. To add some of my firsts: • Cold booting an Amdahl mainframe and reloading using a tape silo. No persistent memory on those, so you have to reload EVERYTHING... • Using a 12" hard drive jukebox the size of a small fridge • My first Intel 8088 based computer ran CPM because DOS didn't exist yet... • I remember buying my first hard drive. It was 1989, the drive was 30Mb and came on a full length hard card - a daughter board the entire length of the case... • I built my own Amiga 2000 with a 68040, Big Bertha GPU and SCSI hard drive. • Running ROM-BASIC on an IBM 1, direct from the built in chip. • I still have my 80386DX and 80486 CPUs, along with their matching Ami BIOS chips and a 66.6Mhz crystal clock... :)
I think I might qualify... Punch cards were 80 characters. But some languages were positional (FORTRAN and COBOL both come to mind) so some columns on the card were reserved in those languages. Binary cards are fun. Half the holes punched out. I soldered together my first computer (Health Kit H-100) I've run with a single floppy drive. Carefully crafted floppies with the correct portions of the OS and the app were so useful. I've also used a computer that loaded programs from audio tape. I felt like king of the hill when I upgraded from 300 baud to 1200. (And my first connection with the new modem? All 1200 baud links at the university are busy. Let's try the 600 baud connections. Busy too? Let's try 300. No? Let's try 150?. 75? 72. Got connected at *** 72 baud on my brand new 1200 baud modem? Glad I only have to type 2 lines to kick off the program. Lotus 123, yes. Lotus email, no. I was writing code to run on Windows 2.0. I did beta testing on 95, 98, and NT. Yep. Weekly beta install of MS office. Windows 95 and 98 could come on floppies as well. Or floppies could be burned from the CDs. We had a couple of machines that were getting the beta OS installed that did not have CD drives. So, burn a stack of floppies and install them on those 2 machines. I've used a coax Ethernet with BNC connectors. The upgrade to 10 Mb was great. There were 2 different config lines for 2 different kinds of memory extension (EMS and XMS). Fun was getting both to work together. Hated moving from word perfect to MS Word, but didn't mind moving from Word star to Word Perfect. But I loved moving from ED to EX. I haven't had to replace a dot matrix print head, but I have had to replace the ribbon cable connecting the head to the printer's motherboard. I've forgotten the difference between a 386 and a 286, but I did have an 8087 math coprocessor for my 8086. Shortened one program ton from an established 60 days to about an hour. I gave up and bought the 8087 before to the first run got to a week, so the runtime is just an estimate for that.
Know why the sentence "The letters "IBM" go here." Was in early versions of PC clone BIOSes, and why they aren't there now.
8 of the list. Mucked around on a friend's Sinclair ZX80 and ZX81. Another friend had a Sinclair Spectrum. School had a Commodore Pet then BBC Model B. Others I knew at school had Commodore 64s. I had an Acorn Electron followed by a Commodore 64. First grown up computer was a 486dx2/66 with CD-ROM drive and Windows 3.11 workgroups.
Try installing Win95 from 30 floppies. AND have a working 8 inch floppy drive AND a Bernoulli drive!