Hollerith cards, although a lot of people called them IBM cards or just punch cards.
I ran computers that used those, and paper/mylar tape. In fact, I had a summer job after high school where I was writing device drivers, and had to toggle my bootstrap programs in using switches on the front panel of the computer!
Also used a Linotype machine.
Can’t beat a good stereoscope for some 3D aerial photo interpretation.
You know human nature far too well. The same thing happened with word processors.
In the late sixties I worked in a little neighborhood store with a grill & soda fountain and made shakes and malts out of hand-scooped ice cream. Of course there are places that still do that instead of loading the mix into a machine for dispensing. They also had a manual cash register, but usually used the electric one, because that one would calculate the tax.
During rushes the boss would work the old register for in-store customers. The rushes were mostly junior high kids coming to the window before and after school to buy candy and gum. It was a niche market.
Not actually that boring.
I used to make wire-wrap boards.
The engineers would make a schematic and rough component layout and I would put all those components into a breadboard. All the connections would be made with thin wires that would be tightly wrapped around each pin.
We used a power tool where you would stick the stripped end of the wire into a small hole on the end of the tool, and a slightly larger hole next to it would go over the pin. Pull the trigger, and the wire is tightly wrapped around the pin. Repeat 1000 times.
There was some creativity involved, as the engineers would always want to have more connections to a single pin than were physically possible, particularly on grounds. So I’d have to re-route some of them. And the wire was hair thin, with an enamel coating, and a bitch to strip.
One of my previous jobs isn’t totally outdated, but it’s getting there… I used to run a one-hour photo lab. I had to feed the film canister into one slot in the machine, then catch the filmstrip as it came out another slot. Then I’d feed the filmstrip into slot #3 and catch the prints as they came out. Whole process start to finish took about 20 minutes.
I actually operated the telephone plug board at a motel. I had some fun one night when I got an obscene phone call and connected it the room one of the other desk clerks was using.
I also used punch cards to program computers on Xerox Sigma 7s and the IBM 360/65.
In college, aiming to be a copywriter, I landed an internship in the art department of the local newspaper, doing mock-ups for advertisements (mostly those horrible used-car ads). They had just gotten a copier with zoom capabilities but still taught me to use the old art-o-graph. Do you remember the art-o-graph?
It seemed old-fashioned to me as I had begun to rent time on a Mac for writing my term papers instead of using my typewriter. The computer was a huge boon for my dyslexic self. But I learned it all and enjoyed the job.
When I graduated, I had to give up the internship. I found a job at this little company called Best Buy, where I began to work on a Mac full-time as a writer. I went back to the manager of the newspaper art dept. and told him that he must, MUST, send one of the employees to a seminar to see how layouts could be done directly on the computer. So he sent Jane. Jane promptly came back gushing about all the stuff that could be done on the computer.
Flash forward two years.
I was laid off of Best Buy because they overexpanded and had to cut people left and right. Jane suggested I apply for a full-time position in the paper’s art department again. So, I applied. The old manager had retired and the new guy had a computer background.
I didn’t get the job. Get this - the reason is that I had no computer graphic experience. :smack:
That was a long, long time ago.
I learned how to wind 8-track tape cartridges. These are the industrial-strength version of the home 8-track, and radio stations used them to record ads and jingles and sometimes songs. You took audio tape, determined the right length, wound it onto the platter and then spliced it in.
I also did publishing paste-up using a waxer and X-Acto knife.
I did a lot of video recording on 3/4-in reel-to-reel tapes.
For years, my father had an old fashioned cash register in his store. It had buttons for various amounts that could be combined to register up to $99.99. He also had an old-fashioned adding machines, with about fifteen rows of keys between 1 and 9.
I also learned how to use an abacus to add and subtract.
The tape cartridges used by radio stations were a different technology from eight-tracks. Radio station “carts” were only dual-track (for stereo) and had a hole in the bottom of the case where the capstan pivoted up and into the cartridge. This was the same form factor used for the now-forgotten four-track tapes. Eight-tracks had a cheap plastic capstan sealed inside each case.
At any rate, I did a lot of these things, including keypunching, pulling slugs of hot type with a Ludlow machine, and a couple decades of pasteup.
In my younger days, when I was working for a manual-labor temp agency for extra money, I was sent to help move out old telephone switching equipment. It was not quite the kind you mention, but it was definitely old-fashioned. The ones that were still hooked up while we were moving the others out, you could hear them clicking, with each click being a call going through.
There was also the old-fashioned adding machine, and I even used to operate one of those old cash registers where you had to push down the keys hard and different numbers on metal plates would pop up in the window.
When I worked way back in the 80’s, the telephone plug switchboard - it was surprisingly easy to get the knack. Then they switched over to a single telephone console with buttons, and I couldn’t find the knack for that thing at all. I suppose they have voice mail now.
Teletype machines. The thing would begin shaking and whistling and then clattering away, and some Important Message would appear on a role of yellow paper. The noise kept me from dozing off in mid afternoon, I must say. Then someone would go over and rip the sheet off and deliver the message to whoever. Even then, it was antiquated, like something in an old fashioned movie set in a newsroom.
And when I went to business school, this was before computers everywhere - they showed us a room full of things like adding machines, teletype machines, different kinds of typewriter, various doodads we might come across in our clerical careers. There was one thing called a bookkeeping machine (you can google it for an image). It was huge and complicated and we certainly weren’t given any lessons on the thing, thank god, it was just terrifying to even look at! And even then it was antiquated. It looked like something a secretary would have been using back at the turn of the century (20th, that is), keeping the records for Mr. Widget at the umbrella factory…
The IBM selectric typewriter, of course. I was a whiz of a typist, I must say, clattering away on the thing. When I was reading my shorthand notes and typing up a letter, if my boss came over to tell me something, I could read ahead a paragraph in a few seconds and type it while looking at him and talking. He always seemed to be disturbed by this and told me to cut it out! I was just multi-tasking, it wasn’t like the letter was full of dollar amounts being sent off to Poland.
I used to scrutineer dance competitions on paper.
The scrutineer uses an arcane system to turn judges’ marks into recalls/placements for couples. Doing it on paper meant populating a page for every event with the couples entered in that event, then going through each scrawled judge’s sheet by hand to check off the couples marked. You were constantly getting behind, and the emcee was always trying to get the sheet for the next round before you even finished marking it. I once scrutineered a competition where I sat down at 8 AM, got up at 5 PM long enough to go pee, then sat back down and finished at 3 AM. I ate one-handed and never put down my pencil.
Nowadays it’s all done by computer. More modern competitions give the judges PDAs, and beam the marks to the scrutineer’s computer, so all you have to do is print out a sheet for the recall.
I have a couple of odd skills I developed during all this - I can listen to someone recite a string of numbers and check them off, often getting two or three numbers behind but buffering them and getting them all marked, while someone else reads an overlapping list over a microphone. I can also distinguish the orthography of numbers as written by those educated in the US, in the UK, and in Europe. There is one particular scrawl which is a “7” if written by a US judge, a “1” if written by a UK judge, and a “4” if written by a European judge.
This technology probably hasn’t disappeared altogether, but it’s certainly been dated by more recent developments.
Just out of high school, i had a job as a cellarman at a large club. That meant i was responsible for keeping the beer flowing to the club’s five bars, as well as making sure the bars were stocked with liquor.
The club was an Australian rugby league club, and a key part of their income was slot machines (or “pokies,” as they are colloquially known in Australia). These were not the modern machines where you swipe credit cards or whatever; you put coins into them, and each day the coins had to be emptied out by hand, which was also part of the cellarman’s duties.
There was a hopper under the machine, and we would lift it out and pour the coins into a bucket on a scale, which would weigh them and calculate the value. Once the value was recorded, the coins would be dumped into a big, rolling metal bin, and once all the machines had been emptied, the coins would be scooped from the cart (using big metal scoops) into coin-counting machines. We would attached cotton bags to the machines, let them count out $200 worth of coins, then tie of the bags with rubber bands. The bags would then be taken to the safe.
There were usually three of us cellarmen on lifting, scooping and bagging duty, a pokies guy who ran around opening the machines, a manager to record the amount of money taken from each machine, and a club director to write it all down. This whole process generally took about 2 hours each morning, and was, for those of us doing the lifting, a pretty physical task. A metal hopper containing over $1,000 worth of 20-cent-pieces is pretty heavy, and there were a couple of hundred machines in the club.
Eh? There is 1/2" open reel videotape, and 1" open reel videotape. But the only 3/4" tape was in cartridges. I say this as someone with a JVC U-Matic editing machine on a shelf above my desk.
I was in college long, long ago, and worked the college switchboard a few hours a week. It was a really old system even then. Not only did we have to plug everybody in, we had to make the phone ring.
Which was kind of cool. You could give your friends fancy rings.
The down side of course, when it was busy, you had to remember to keep ringing all the calls you had connected.
They replaced this antique system after the first year I was in school, and most of the calls into the dorm went in automatically. Even with the old system, all intra-system calls could be dialed, and rang automatically, but people had to call the switchboard to make an outside call, and all outside calls had to go through us. And there went our jobs! The only thing left for us to do was intra-system directory assistance.
I worked in a newsroom during the switch from Xacto knife and waxed galleys to electronic publishing and PageBurst. That was some fun. It sounded good, but the first issue somebody did something, and every paragraph in the issue had about a 10-pica indent on the first line. And nobody could fix it! At least in the olden days when you stuck a piece of copy onto the flats, it pretty much stayed where you put it.
Inevitably we had to start editing on the screen rather than on paper, which to me seems like a whole different process. Of course this meant we also had to make the corrections, which–it seemed to me–added to our workload. And this was the beginning of learning new software, and then learning some more new software six months later…and so on.
Plowing farm ground with a 70 year old tractor is a fun time. Archaic in many ways, not many farmers fit ground anymore…it’s mostly no till planting now.
Hard hot, dusty, dirty work, no power steering. No power lifts. No electric start. No hydraulics…you yank a rope to “trip” the plow up and down…hoping you don’t get stuck in the mud, as the plow needs to be moving forward to lift itself up. If you get stuck, you can’t move forward to lift the plow…in other words, you’re hooked to an anchor.
At least I did it on a tractor with rubber tires. Steel wheels would have been really rough on the back!
Chugging along at 3MPH or less makes for a long day.
But still fun!
Not me but my husband spend 20 years as a commercial photo re-toucher. It was his job to fix all of those little things that are easily accomplished now by a 10 year old with Photoshop using negatives, chemicals, cut outs, etc. He worked in NYC and his shop had some fairly big accounts (Sears Catalog, Sports Illustrated) before they started losing business to automation.
My first non-babysitting job was on Saturdays at the company where my dad worked. I was hired to, among other things, run the switchboard - an old PBX type with the big, clunky headset and all the wires to connect incoming calls with the correct extension. It was in 1970…
In the summer, Dad would have me work when they needed help, so I got to do cool stuff like run the mimeograph machine (getting high on fumes and going home with purple fingers) and when they went high-tech, I got to run the flex-o-writer! It was this huge monstrosity that read punched tape. They used it to type frequently used addresses on invoices and other documents. I would run off folders full of invoices for specific companies so the clerks only had to fill in billing numbers and dates. It was noisy and slow, but faster than a typist, and as long as I lined up the forms correctly, it did a good job.
Then in January of '73, I took my first computer class. I learned to punch cards. I learned it was very exacting. Three years later in a different university, I took my second computer class: programming in FORTRAN, more punch cards. That was when you recognized the computer geeks on campus by the boxes of cards they hauled around.
In the early seventies I spent some time setting movable type using a California Job Case.
I am familiar with those. But what technology has supplanted that for prototypes?