# The Early Days of My IT Career



## BrotherBart (May 22, 2016)




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## mass_burner (May 22, 2016)

Me too. Started on big iron,  IBM mainframes.


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## Ashful (May 22, 2016)

My college curriculum included three courses named:  Mainframes, Mini Computers, and Micro Computers.  Spent a lot of time doing assembly language and machine code.


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## BrotherBart (May 22, 2016)

mass_burner said:


> Me too. Started on big iron,  IBM mainframes.



If we had known about using dry wood they probably would have run faster.


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## Jags (May 23, 2016)

I can only assume that was you in the blue....


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## Huntindog1 (May 25, 2016)

I wasnt an IT guy but did do some programming on main frames in college.
My trade was into computers for controlling engines.  Called ECMS.
Now computers helps engines meet emissions figure that.
I can tell you this that the complexity of how a computer tunes an engine for performance and emissions
is right down mind boggling. Lucky for me I work at the Technician Level not the Engineering level.
I am not as old as BB so he will have to tell you about punch cards.


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## Sprinter (May 25, 2016)

Huntindog1 said:


> I am not as old as BB so he will have to tell you about punch cards.


I could, too.  In college, I had to do all my Fortran work with punch cards.  A nightmare.  After doing your coding on paper, you had to punch a card for each line as I recall, after reserving a punch machine.  Then the computer operator ran them and gave your printout next day.  Often with an error or two and you had to do it over.

Even now, I recall all that vividly.  It was sort of fun then, but wouldn't be now.

Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.


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## mass_burner (May 25, 2016)

Sprinter said:


> I could, too.  In college, I had to do all my Fortran work with punch cards.  A nightmare.  After doing your coding on paper, you had to punch a card for each line as I recall, after reserving a punch machine.  Then the computer operator ran them and gave your printout next day.  Often with an error or two and you had to do it over.
> 
> Even now, I recall all that vividly.  It was sort of fun then, but wouldn't be now.
> 
> Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.


They made us do a small program assembly to see how it used to be, but we had CRTs.


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## Ashful (May 26, 2016)

Just handed one of my new employees a floppy disk.  She just finished her MSEE, so probably 25 years old.  She had to ask which way it faces when putting it in the drive.  Didn't realize I was old, until just now.


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## Jags (May 26, 2016)

Ashful said:


> Just handed one of my new employees a floppy disk.


Okay - need clarification - If it was a 3.5", you aren't old.  If it was a 5.25", you might be old, but if it was an 8" - yeah, you are old.


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## Ashful (May 26, 2016)

Jags said:


> Okay - need clarification - If it was a 3.5", you aren't old.  If it was a 5.25", you might be old, but if it was an 8" - yeah, you are old.


The 8 inchers pre-date my adult working life.  I grew up on 5.25".

Sadly, this was only 3.5", but still too old for a 25-year old to have ever used.  Remember, the 199o's was 20 years ago.


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## Jags (May 26, 2016)

I don't remember the 1990's. 

When I first started in this IT stuff, my mainframe was still consuming a steady diet of the 8" discs.


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## jatoxico (May 26, 2016)

Apu's punch card thesis. I'm a sucker for all things Simpson.


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## Shari (May 27, 2016)

I worked for company when it first introduced computers.  They I had a 'computer room' that was about 20' x 20'; separate air system, you wore blue booties on your feet and hair nets when you entered the "Computer Room";  reel-to-reel tapes whirred and somewhere someone did the punch cards.  I worked in the corporate accounting department (24 branch offices) and suggested a 10 digit coding system (000-000-0000) to expense payables when the computer IT guys wanted only a 6 digit system.  My 10 digit suggestion won out even though I had only taken Basic programming classes I could see the builtin growth benefits of a 10 digit system.


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## jharkin (May 27, 2016)

Ashful said:


> Just handed one of my new employees a floppy disk.  She just finished her MSEE, so probably 25 years old.  She had to ask which way it faces when putting it in the drive.  Didn't realize I was old, until just now.
> 
> 
> Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk



http://www.techrepublic.com/pictures/ghosts-of-tech-past-photos-of-storage-devices-from-1950s-1980s/

This one came up as one of those recommended articles in my facebook feed the other day.  Surprised myself that I recognized over half of them, including 8 inch floppies, cassette deck storage devices , washing machine hard disks punch cards, etc.


When I was a kid our first computer was a TI - the programs came on Atari like cartridges and it used an audio  cassette  deck for data storage - I remember my dad doing rudimentary spreadsheets on it.  Then we had a Tandy with 5.25in drives and I remember my Dad taking me to the data center in his office that had those giant washing machine sized hard disks where the drum was held on a spring suspension in a refrigerated case.

By college we had 3.5in floppies, hard drives, etc. They showed us punch cards in class for history  but the systems where long gone.   I remember still getting software on huge stacks of 3.5s in freshman year and starting to use more CDRoms by the mid years and then the IOmega zip drives (remember those??)


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## Lake Girl (May 27, 2016)

I vaguely recall learning how to do punch cards.  The Hubby bought two Commodore Vic 20s for his brothers' kids.  Can't remember the brand of the first computer we had for a DOS based system but it had the 5.25 discs.  Computers were available at work mostly for stats but I started to use them for client resumes (youth employment program) ... so much easier for corrections and saving copies! 

By the time the kids hit late elementary school, 3.5 discs and then CD roms were the thing.  When my son hit high school, his handwriting was so bad that his grades suffered.  Encouraged him to start using the computer when he had to write papers/reports.  Then came the video games ... Warcraft and Flight Sims were big in our house.  I created a monster though ... got his BS and is now the IT guy for the computer department at the University where he earned his degree


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## Huntindog1 (May 27, 2016)

In college I had to build a Z80 computer right code on paper in assembly language then enter it into my computer in machine language

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## firefighterjake (May 27, 2016)

Jags said:


> Okay - need clarification - If it was a 3.5", you aren't old.  If it was a 5.25", you might be old, but if it was an 8" - yeah, you are old.



Guess that makes me fall under the "might be old" as I remember using the 5.25s when in junior high and high school . . . progressed to the 3.5s in college.


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## firefighterjake (May 27, 2016)

Ashful said:


> The 8 inchers pre-date my adult working life.  I grew up on 5.25".
> 
> Sadly, this was only 3.5", but still too old for a 25-year old to have ever used.  Remember, the 199o's was 20 years ago.



Sometimes . . . oftentimes . . . I forget just how long ago the 1990s were . . . especially when they start playing music from that time with Nirvana, Tragically Hip, Smithereens, etc. for special "Way Back Weekends" or "Classic Rock from the Past" on the different radio stations.


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## Lake Girl (May 27, 2016)

firefighterjake said:


> Guess that makes me fall under the "might be old" as I remember using the 5.25s when in junior high and high school . . . progressed to the 3.5s in college.


The 5.25s came in during the mid-70s so I guess I'm more the "might be old" ... would have just finished up elementary school.

There is a Mac 5011 sitting up at our local dump complete with keyboard and mouse ... worth about $80.  Wonder what it cost new?


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## BrotherBart (May 27, 2016)

Huntindog1 said:


> I am not as old as BB so he will have to tell you about punch cards.



The actual first computer I was third shift operator on was an IBM 360 mainframe. We thought we had died and gone to heaven when it was upgraded to 512K of main memory. We could then run two jobs at the same time. Running three grocery distribution centers and 200 supermarkets. The next big jump for it was when we got the first disk drive packs ,28 megabytes each, to augment the tape drives we were using. The disks were only for running job storage. All input and output was from and to reel to reel tape.

All programs were on 80 column punched cards from the programmers punched on the 029 card punch machines then compiled and data came from that army of ladies right outside the computer room door making a sea of 029 card punches sing all day. For each job you hung the tapes, loaded the card reader, started the job at the typewriter console, set the console alarm and went to sleep until it went off to tell you to start the printer.

And speaking of old, that was when I was 25.


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## DuckDog (May 27, 2016)

I know I may be a newbie to most of you since I've only been involved in corporate communications, and now product support, since 1998 but I'll never forget the day in 1999 when we all went down to the server room and marveled at the new NetApp storage system. It filled two 6 foot high 19" racks and stored up to 1.1 TB of data! Minds were blown that day! Lol!


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## Lake Girl (May 27, 2016)

Went poking around to see if I could find the beast ... 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_S...Bild-F038812-0014,_Wolfsburg,_VW_Autowerk.jpg

Had to laugh, on the desk was a phone that looked like it was a multi-line sitting right beside the trusty rotary dial


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## BrotherBart (May 27, 2016)

Lake Girl said:


> Had to laugh, on the desk was a phone that looked like it was a multi-line sitting right beside the trusty rotary dial



What you don't see there are the data phones. We transmitted through them at 150 BAUD to other data phones. That was the network of the day. Every night after the store orders job finished after running for six to eight hours I transmitted them to the printers at the distribution centers over three of those things. And if the line burped, ya started all over again.

And on that console is the display you used to diagnose problems. In binary.


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## Lake Girl (May 27, 2016)

Computing has come a long way ... higher speed, bigger storage, tiny devices and wireless.  At one point, I was way ahead of my boy in terms of computer knowledge.  Now, not so much ... I've been left in the dust!

When a Great Aunt passed away in her 80s (born 1900), I used to ponder the advances she had seen in her lifetime - cars, phones, planes, space travel, computers, etc.  Apparently in 1907 in Fort Erie, ON, her family was the first on their street that had an indoor bathroom.  So many things that we take for granted.

It's an interesting question to pose to oneself....


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## begreen (May 28, 2016)

Jags said:


> I don't remember the 1990's.
> 
> When I first started in this IT stuff, my mainframe was still consuming a steady diet of the 8" discs.


LOL, when I started out I was polishing the disks for handmade hard drives.


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## Ashful (May 30, 2016)

begreen said:


> LOL, when I started out I was polishing the disks for handmade hard drives.


The modern, "back in my day," speech.  I think uphill both ways in snow with my feet wrapped in newspaper, or the dust bowl stories, still win.  ;-)


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## BrotherBart (May 30, 2016)

Ashful said:


> The modern, "back in my day," speech.  I think uphill both ways in snow with my feet wrapped in newspaper../



Feet? You had feet?


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## begreen (May 30, 2016)

When I lived in Cornwall, CT I loved the tales of the old timers there. The roads were not paved and during the winter kids in some parts went to school in a horse and sleigh. A couple fellows recalled kids getting frostbite during particularly hard winters.


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## Lake Girl (May 30, 2016)

In the not so distant past, the trains were the life lines to get to points east.  That was before they built the Noden Causeway for vehicular traffic that was opened in 1965.  Many of the farming families still have some horses, sleighs, wagons ... just a hobby now.  A large portion of the logging industry in this area was managed by draft horses for many years - pulling logs to the river for log drives.  The original highway was a corduroy road...


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