Once in college, while working as a part-time surveyor (basically had a 9 to 5 office job as an civil engineer-in-training, but filled in for the surveyors who went on vacation during the summer) we actually broke out the rod and level to do a small-scale topo survey once.
No idea why; the total stations(combination transit & level that used lasers) that we usually used were a lot more accurate and easier to use, but the crew chief wanted to use them, so we busted them out and looked like we were from the 1940s or something.
Punch Card Machines – I wrote my first programs on decks of IBM punch cards (so did Pepper Mill)
Analog Computers – I actually used them for solving diffie Q’s. Again, my wife used them, too.
Slide Rule – I used a slide rule (that I bought with a $20 bill that I found) through high school and my first two years of college (MIT), until the HP 295 came out with its affordable price.
**Electric Typewriters, Scientigic Polaroids, Storage Oscilloscopes, Dymo Tapes, ** and a host of other things
I have a handful of fire alarm systems that are still in use that are programmed with an old DOS program. The communications protocol is very picky and I use an old Thinkpad 770 to program these systems. The most recent OS I have been able to successfully use for this is Windows 98.
I have used a planimeter at work. Also, rather than PCs we originally had monitors tied to the mainframe and we would make our input files by manually counting the spaces between columns on a plain DOS-looking screen.
Other former newspaper/magazine types: Doesn’t the smell of melting wax just jolt you still? That waxer was such a good, reliable little machine. And made your hands nice and soft!
I see I’m not a unique old lady with my mad linotype and cut-and-paste skills. We also ran the strips of copy through a waxer to lay them on the pages.
I also worked for newspapers that used computer and CompuGraphic newswriting terminals and later, for a paper that still used typewriters and a typesetter on a linotype. I got into journalism about when things were transitioning in the mid-1980s.
I was the chief (actually sole) operator and repairman for a large electronic analog computer. They actually claimed it was the largest in the world at the time (around 1955). It used op-amp packages that were built around subminiature tubes (about an inch or inch and a half long, less than a half inch in diameter and just ending in fine wires that had to soldered) that were always burning out, so much of my job was diagnosing and repairing the packages. The computer (which was designed to solve a certain type of simultaneous Diff Eqs) was programmed by running phono-cables between components and the output was on a 'scope screen. Even while I was there, the university had acquired a Univac I (a gift from Rem-Rand) and others were programming it to solve the same kind of problems (using punch cards), so I was essentially obsolete. When I left I don’t think they bothered to replace me. My watch (which has day/date, temperature, phases of the moon, and tidal displays) has much more computing power than that computer or than the Univac I.
Another job I had in the same lab was operating an electron microscope, vintage 1930s. To make a stereo photo (which we did a lot) we had to break the vacuum, toggle the specimen holder to a slightly different orientation, pump down the vacuum again and take a second photo. I also poured petri dishes by hand. After the culture medium was sterilized in a high pressure autoclave, I had to grab the extremely hot flask with a thick pot-holder, briefly lift the lid of a sterilized empty dish, pour the medium drop the lid and let them cool. I don’t know if petri dishes are still used or if they are filled in that way. And oh yes, preparation of catalase. Catalase is an enzyme that catalyzes the reduction of peroxide, I believe. At any rate, a certain bacterium, Micrococcus lysodiekticus (I think it was) has 1% of its body weight in catalase for some reason. So it was relatively easy to collect it in gram quantities, which was more that for any other enzyme, at least at the time. Now you just buy it off the shelf from companies that must have automated the process. But we would grow the bug in a 20 liter flask for a few days, run the liquid medium through a continuous centrifuge, break the cells with some chemical (benzene?) filter out the broken cells and then boil off the liquid in a partial vacuum to lower the boiling point of water to 60 C. I think there was another purification step but after nearly 55 years it is getting a bit hazy.
Cut and Paste lay out - yes
Waxer - Yes
Lino-type - yes
Process Camera. This was a giant, room sized camera, that could enlarge, reduce, reverse (turn to negative) any piece of black and white art. Its primary process (where I worked, anyway) was “Screening”. For the layperson, this meant processing photographs so that they turned into a series of little black dots, (look at a newspaper b/w photo today - its still made up of little black dots). Screening was an arcane blend of art, photochemistry and skill.
Today you hit a button on your publishing software.
I have also used a slide rule, made PC Boards(single sided), and repaired vacuum tube radios/tvs, audio equipment.
I felt pretty old and obsolete as when a 20 something “kid” where I worked asked me how one used a dial telephone. She had only seen them in movies, and wanted to know how they were operated.
My stepson’s girlfriend and my daughter both admit to having a hard time telling time from an analog clock, and terms like “20 after 3” or “Quarter to 6” sound archaic to them. Still, I remember my great grandmoth saying “T’is 5 of the clock”.
I have an I-Pod that has more transistors than existed on the planet the year I was born, probably by several orders of magnitude.
Bit of a side ramble, there … you know us old guys… alwqays going on about “how things were back then…”
Hey you kids! Get off my lawn… grumble grumble mutter mutter…
For the kids: Thinwire was something we used for computer networking before 10baseT took hold, not to mention 100baseT, gigabit ethernet, and all the fancy stuff we have today. Twisted pair just wasn’t around that much when I started in networking. What was popular in our neck of the woods was thinwire.
Thinwire was kinda like broadband cable, without the “broadband” aspect. The wire could only carry a single frequency. So, it was good for small networks. At every workstation, we had to cut the cable, crimp connectors onto both ends, and install a “T” connector between them. That “T” connector plugged into the networking card in their computer. The thinwire had to be “terminated” at both ends with a special connector called a terminator.
We ran miles of the stuff. And now it’s all worthless.
I wrote the procedure manuals and trained the secretaries to create the US Navy’s first “paperless” office. Unfortunately we were unable to get around the fact that - other offices still being paperful - we would need to produce forms in triplicate to get anything requisitioned.
Two submarine engineers (always the best guys to go to if you need to jury-rig something!) helped me re-set a couple of dot matrix printers to hit hard enough to work on the self-carboned forms.
The secretaries were not keen on giving up their IBM selectrics, and one wore out two keyboards in six months because she had come up on manual typewriters. But the hardest ofall were the executives, who clearly felt that laying a finger on a keyboard was a threat to their masculinity, and to their authority.
Slight off topic, but interesting nonetheless… the thinwire, old 10base-T ethernet, 100base-T ethernet, gigabit ethernet, and even 802.11 are all pretty much identical, except for the actual transmission medium (coax, twisted pair, radio).
Amazing the amount of equipment we needed for this job, eh? And now, not so much … I don’t miss pasteup at all, but I do become nostalgic for the smell of melted wax in the morning.
I also miss the old photographic process. Watching your print develop in the developer bath - it was like magic!
And re: punch cards. I remember the classifieds in our newspaper being filled with want ads for keypunch operators. I wonder what happened to all those people, what they did after those days were over.
I worked at a TV station in the early 80’s as a copywriter, When I first got the job I had to make my own art boards for a few months until the station bought a Chyron I character generator.
I was also a member of the paste-up brigade. Nobody has mentioned those big expensive books of ugly clip art. I remember being very excited when they bought me an Apple Macintosh and Aldus Pagemaker.
I’ve run these as well, at a couple of jobs. When the power goes out, you use a handle on the side to manually crank it: tic, tic, tic, ka-ching! Oh, and you looked up sales tax on a chart taped to the register.
Ah, typewriters. I was taught to type on a manual typewriter, in the mid-80s. My teacher used it, even though electrics were widely available, because it taught you to strike with equal force with every finger so that the letters would be of uniform darkness.
Back in the mid-60s I spent a summer or two on my aunt and uncle’s farm in eastern Washington - I drove a horse-drawn hay mower and haywagon. That’s pretty old school.
