I installed one of the early Halon 1301 fire suppression systems to protect a room full of keypunch operators
My first job, in 1974, was at a local print shop where I hand set lead type from a California job case and printed everything from envelopes and business cards to numbered tickets on a hand-fed Chandler & Price printing press.
On the other side of the shop I pasted up photo type and cut rubylith overlays for the offset printing department.
Early in my career we still used card readers in our computer center. I’ve run it a few times when helping out in the computer center.
I has a licience as a Third Assistant Engineer Steam ant Hp to woek on steam ships.
At one time I worked in a department store on the Drum roller cash registers.
As a kid on the ranch we had a crank phone. The type you picked up ask if line bussy and turned the crank to get the operator.
Used a slide rule in college.
Running the overhead projector in the classroom. I don’t know what they do in a classroom now, but the old overhead projector was brought in on a cart. The lights were turned down, and everyone got to doze off for a while, listening to a scratchy history lesson…zzzz…
I worked with a Telex machine at a company my dad managed in 1981. The operator was on sick leave and my dad showed me the basics.
My first lab job was making culture media like this back in 1987. I poured hundreds of plates by hand and got really good at keeping them a consistent thickness and as smooth as glass. No bubbles on my media! Even though a lot of the identification and susceptibilities are done via automation nowadays the bugs still need to be grown out on plates but they’re all commercially made. And frankly, sometimes they’re not as nice looking as mine were.
I ran an IBM Proof Machine, supposedly the only IBM equipment at the time that moved paper, but didn’t require punch cards. It was used for several tasks at the bank such as sorting checks. Not shown in the picture is the back of the unit, which had 33 adding machine tape printers, one for each sorting slot and a master. The first task of the day was to make sure these all had paper.
I developed a way of “programming” it to do some other tasks the bank didn’t know it could do, like tallying loan payments using coupons. Programming was done by jumper wires on a small pegboard and the boss was afraid I would screw it up every day.
Our bank had only 2 of these, but the large downtown banks had entire floors full of them with their operators.
Since I was born in 1930, and graduated from college (engineering) in 1953, I’ve worked with a ton of now obsolete things, including, but not limited to,
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Slide rule. Still have my old K&E Log Log Duplex Decitrig, and can still, by golly, use all the scales!
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Manual calculating machines. Taking a square root on one of these involved quite a bit of arm and wrist movement.
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IBM punch cards for programming. Punched by hand. Got very good at cutting tiny bits of sticky tape and putting it over a mispunched hole.
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Computers that used those awful cards. Our IBM was booted up using a stack of them inches thick. Sometimes one would be misread and the whole process gone thru again until it finally took.
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Old fashioned transits and level guns. Still own a transit, and use it on occasion.
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Need we mention typewriters? The backspace key alone in enough to justify the complete takeover by computerized word processing.
Am undoubtedly leaving out a whole bunch of stuff. But this will give an idea.
PS: I’ve made butter in an old churn, and used an ice cream machine!
PPS: Attended a one room country school. On rainy days would be taken there in a horse and buggy.
PPPS: Still remember when Dad came home with a genuine Aladdin Lamp. And still remember how it made so much more light than a regular kerosene lamp. These, BTW, are still made, and still look exactly like that 1935 model Dad brought home.
I used a slide rule in high school and for my first year and a half of college. My folks splurged and gave me a Rockwell Electronic Sliderule for Christmas of my sophomore year - so I was one of the cool kids with a calculator. I used that thing for years till it just died.
I’ve still got a sliderule somewhere around here, and I still remember how to do a few simple operations, I think…
My dad had a brace and bit but I never tried to use it. It was fun to spin, tho. 
You can buy them all ready to go, but many people still do it like this.
Yep, done that! In fact I owned one.
Also drawn surveyor’s plats and blueprints with a drawing table, T-square, templates and India ink. And done cartography work with ink and dry transfers, and calculated areas with a manual planimeter.
Manual typewriter, check. I still own the old Olympia elite portable that saw me through college.
Ran photo labs for two newspapers; a daily and a small-town weekly. Learned to load film canisters in the dark, run the enlarger, trays with chemical bath, etc. The daily was pretty high-tech, they had a print dryer. At the weekly we just hung 'em out to line dry.
I used to work on a Cray-1 “supercomputer”. My MacBook has more processing power.
I talked on a phone that had to be held in the crook of my neck and shoulder for 8 hours a day.
Heh, yes, I worked on office microcomputers in the 1980s before the IBM PC became the industry standard. Figure maybe 10 different machines in the room, and all their hard disc capacity put together isn’t a tenth of what I can get on a USB drive the size of my thumbnail and costing less than £10 today.
LOL. You are almost as obsolete as I am. 
I got Living Blues Magazine published in the 1970’s and early '80s with the previously-mentioned old typesetting/graphic arts techniques. I even wrote up a whole story about it for teemings, the SDMB’s sister online publication, but it never got onto the site 
If anyone wants to “Read all about it!”, contact me via SDMB Private Message and I can send you out some obsolete MS Word (2003?) files, complete with internet links.
It was a whole lotta fun reminiscing with my co-partner in crime, for-real typographer Justin O’Brien (full sidebar about him also available), but discouraging that really, no one gave a damn about my grunging about in a dank, flooded basement with cat shit floating around 
… :eek: Living Blues lives! www.livingblues.com
I remember well the awe with which the name “Cray” was spoken. “My company is buying a Cray” somebody would say, and there would be wide eyes all around. . .
I sed to work for a company that still made germanim diodes! (1950’s product). The process of growing the germanium crystals was primative-you basically melted a batch of germanium powder in a silica boat, and then dropped a seed cysrtal in-and took it out of the oven. Then yo sliced it up with a diamond saw-the litttle squares of germanium were packed up and became diodes.
As of 2001, the line was still running.
Some of the tools of teaching that I used as a young teacher are no longer in use. Mimeograph was the common mode of reproduction. We used 16mm educational films that used a movie projector, and I used a larger format in the projector loft of the auditorium. Manual typewriter, blackboards with chalk, manual grade cards that were bubbled in and scanned by a reader, all tests and work done on paper by students and graded by hand by me…