Did you use a Linotype? I finally saw this wonderful documentary a couple weeks ago.
Back in the 90s I actually eliminated someone’s job through automation.
I worked in an import company in Japan and everything was done by hand! I was in the international department so we handled the actual importing of the products.
The calculations for costs for each shipment was extensive, with various shipping costs, insurance and such needing to be cost averaged for all of the products. That information then needed to be manually input into a database.
The amount of inefficiency was staggering. Several people needed to do the same inputting of data which was used for different purposes.
After getting it all sorted out, I wrote some programs to generate the necessary information for everyone.
It went from requiring three people down to one and a half. I got promoted out of there.
They weren’t a Kodak company. It was the minilab that killed them off not digital.
I use to run an IBM 3890 Checksorter. You know that funny printing along the bottom of the check? The 3890 read that and sorted the checks so it could be sent back to your bank from wherever it was deposited. This meant that the branch sent it to the processing center, we sorted it and sent it to a local clearinghouse, the Fed or to the airport if it wasn’t local. It took local couriers, planes, trains, etc as well as about 100 people at the bank to do all that.
What happens now? The teller scans the check at the branch and the image of it is processed automatically. No shipping, handling, or sorting needed. My first job in banking was encoding the amounts on them and OCR does that. The only job for people is if the computer can’t read the image and generates an error, someone looks at the image to see what’s wrong and either inputs the data the computer couldn’t read or contacts the branch to have them re-scan the check. Combined with the decline of checks due to automated/online payments and such, we were down to seven people in the entire dept. - at which point the job was outsourced overseas.
The annoying thing? Banks still act as if the whole rigmarole still happens - the check images are sent out hourly so at most it’s 2 hours to verify a check cleared or bounced if the teller clears their drawer regularly; most banks still have customers waiting days to access the funds, longer for large amounts.
I also used to deliver pizzas and apparently they’re testing self-driving cars for that now in MI.
It’s not so much that the job was eliminated, the internet made the business model obsolete. To be fair it was never a great business model.
My first job in high school was with a company called Consumer Distributors. It was a catalog showroom. You came in and looked through a catalog. You filled out a slip of paper and handed it to a clerk. The clerk handed it to a warehouse monkey like me who ran back and got the item off the high shelves in the most non-OSHA approved method possible. Or it wasn’t there and you had to tell the customer they were out of luck. Amazon does it better.
In the late 80s my college job was in the bowels of the library making computer back ups. Changing out giant tape reels on schedule. I doubt it looks anything like that now.
Me too. Before that I was a pasteup artist. Glad I learned to set type, though - it did give me a foot in the door for desktop publishing.
I used to do keylining for a local classified ads newspaper. This was based on my experience with using a Macintosh to produce print-ready output! All while in high school.
In my general life, part of my job is replacing people with automation. I contribute a great amount to that endeavour. In my case it never really feels bad because we only lose temporary employees; real employees still have a jobs bank. It comes down to: can we save headcount by automating a production process, and, do we have a headcount to spare versus our headcount levels negotiated with the unions. There have been times when we’ve actually created a meaningless, manual process because our labor agreements specify a minimum production headcount (yeah, yeah, unions have their place, but this is silly). It’s not that we’re evil, but the competition means that we have to do it, too, and making agreements with the competition would be seen as collusion and anti-competitive.
Between HS graduation in '92 and heading to Parris Island in '93, I was a temp for Bell Atlantic. I was a “tape jockey” in the data center; the operators would give me lists of IBM 3480 data tapes to be pulled from the tape library, I’d pull them, then feed them to the tape drives (both single-load and stackers) that fed data to the mainframes (IBM 3090 and ES/9000, IIRC). Occasionally, I had to pull tape reels to load the two IBM 729 drives that were still in use in the data center.
Tape silos and cheap HDD-based mass storage eventually put temps like me, and the tape librarian, out of work in data centers.
Fotomats were gone long before digital photography came along. I always attributed it to Polaroids.
There’s an old Fotomat booth in my town that still exists, and it’s a drive-up coffee shop.
You people talking about tape reels, etc. reminds me of the job I had during my Gap Year. I was a keypunch operator, which by the time I came back to that company a few years later was changed to data entry operator.
My very first job was as a night clerk in the Texas Department of Public Safety Driver’s License Division. We would get requests for DL info from all over the state. We’d encode the name with Soundex, then go hunt through a HUGE room full of paper records, pull the record, then teletype the info back to the originating agency. Turnaround time was 5-10 minutes.
Nowadays, the request in typed in by the officer in the patrol car, processed by computer and the response is back to the car in less than 20 seconds.
“A guy comes in to work and his job is eliminated, and you think that of me? No. I am the one who automates!”
My first regular job out of college was in the prepress department of a magazine printer. Customers would send in film negatives for four color offset presses, and I’d sort it into bags for our press layout and tabulate it so the stripping and printing could be billed. I suppose most of the manual prepress stuff is automated now. It was rapidly automating when I was doing it in 1995-96.
Not completely eliminated but two of my earlier jobs; Lab technician in Forensic & Medical Genetics labs have become mostly automated, what used to take 6-10 technicians a couple of days to do is now done by 2 techs with robots in half the time.
I now work for the company that makes the robots.
Automation in labs has definitely pushed up the entry level requirements. When I started, I had a basic BSc and a lot of the managers/senior scientists just had A-levels (between high school graduate & Uni level) but they’d started ages ago. As I was moving on, the Medical Laboratory Assistant jobs (a step below lab tech, pays about as much as looking for pennies on the ground) were being filled by people with PhDs. I think I just scraped in while a BSc was enough and now have 10+ years experience that I think makes up for a lack of MSc or PhD, anyone graduating with just a BSc now is going to be damn lucky to find a lab job.
Worked as an anchor operator on a semi-submersible in the eighties. It’s the big vessel in the pic (not the little ship in front of it). It moved by crawling along the seabed using anchors on giant winches. There were 12 anchors weighing (IIRC) 40K lbs each, and it required two tugboats (small boat in picture) continually fetching the aft anchors forward, and running out the forward anchors as we got closer to them. It also required a survey ship (with crew) to continually monitor position and radio corrections to 2 surveyors on our vessel. All in all, about 35-40 men were involved in moving the vessel. Now it’s been retrofitted with dynamic positioning pods, and has GPS. So only 2-3 crewmen are needed to do the same job.
I know you’re’ (mostly) kidding, but I still shoot 35MM and 120 film. There are a half dozen places locally I can get it developed and many more if I want to do mail order.
Cool jobs, all of them!
Virtually every single job I’ve ever had has been eliminated through animation. I currently have no marketable skills.
In high school I had a couple of Summer jobs as a receptionist. I sat in the front of an office and answered/routed phone calls. I also greeted guests and made sure no strangers went wandering around the place.
Long since replaced by voicemail and security badge readers.
Like, by zombies?
I operated printing presses during the 80s and 90s, and also did prepress and binding.
Prepress used to involve taking the master, which was put together by a typesetter with sticky strips, and making a negative in the camera room. The negative was then attached to a masking sheet, where I would strip away the parts that covered the type, then use opaquing fluid to cover the stray spots. Then I would attach the masking sheet & negative to a plate, put it in a ultraviolet light burner for a minute, and then wash the green stuff away and load the plate on to a printing press. Nowadays, all that needs to be done is for a digital publisher to make a PDF and send it to a laser printer, which then sends the printed material to a fully-automated binding station. All that printing experience I developed was useless.
If I hadn’t picked up on digital publishing, I wouldn’t have been able to keep working. It took me years of onsite work to be considered the same level as any college graduate who takes an entry level job.
Here’s a thread from almost exactly one year ago on topic: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=805951
My first real adult job was typing insurance forms in triplicate. Today it’s computerized.