That’s my timeline too. I learned linotype and wax in college while my workplaces was shifting away from hot type for their stories. Ads were still hand set though.
The Cray I used to work on had a single-digit serial number…
I used some of those old technologies, and I’m surprised there’s one that hasn’t come up yet.
I developed and printed my own photographs in a darkroom. Unloading the film from the cannister, running it through the soup, letting it dry, trying to figure out the aperture and time for the enlarger, all that stuff.
I forgot to mention my time in the Navy.
Our steam plants that we were trained on as nuclear power workers were state-of-the-art in WWII. One of my friends was trained at a plant that was a WWII steam plant with a reactor plant bolted on—the cruiser USS Portsmouth gave its guts for the cause.
General inertia keeps old reliable technology alive and well in the military. I remember once being told by a civilian fireman that the firefighting apparatus we used on ship was ancient.
We’re not wuuurrrrthyyyy . . .
You had a waxer? Lucky. I was usually queasy and nauseated from the rubber-cement fumes.
I have finally had the luxury of giving up support for IE6. gets off everyone’s lawns
Web design/development is such a fast moving industry though. I remember learning by looking at other people’s HTML and CSS and trying to replicate what they did. None of this them there fancy Firebugs and Developer Toolbars to edit on the fly, just a good ol’ text editor.
Oh, golly.
My first job was in a library. We had neat card catalogs with actual cards. We checked out books by removing a special card from the back of the book, and stamping the date due on it, and then filing it in our records. The date was also stamped on a piece of paper glued to the inside back cover. There was a “dater” gadget that attached to a pencil so you could write down the card number of the person checking the book out.
I learned to type on a manual typewriter, and at one time could do easily 70 words per minute. My typing class in high school had exactly one electric typewriter, mostly for demonstration purposes.
In college we typed up the articles and gave them to the linotype operator, who gave us back long galley sheets for proofreading and pasteup. Much later I edited a newletter for a club I belong to, and we did the genuine cut and paste routine.
When I was first in data services, the computer was a large mini (not a mainframe) and everyone’s terminal was hard-wired into it. The shut down and reboot process was done manually at a console. We did our backups onto large reels of tape. The first programming class I took used manual punchcards. Now THAT was a PITA.
Looking back over a few other posts: My dad used to develop photos in the basement, and I learned how to do that as well. Enlarger, exposure, developer, shortstop, fixer. Safe light.
Also during my teaching career I used mimeographs (“spirit duplicator”).
My first office job we had big adding machines, no calculators.
I just called it coax or RG-58 (or RG-59, depending on how lazy I happened to be at the time – I worked at a radio station, where RG-59 ran like water, but I had to buy RG-58 out of my own budget).
I remember the first time I heard about twisted-pair cable, 20 years or so ago, when my manager at the corporate office recommend rewiring my entire office with it and getting rid of all the 10-Base2 cards I had so carefully configured. I thought, what the heck? Why would we want to make all those computers send their traffic back and forth to a switch when they’re just talking to each other?
I got real handy at making 50-ohm terminators with a resistor, BNC connector and a dab of solder as well. I probably still have a box full of them somewhere.
The twinax cables I had to run between floors for the System/36 terminals were a total joy too. They were like garden hoses filled with cement, and didn’t like being worked through tight corners. I always made sure to add an extra foot or so of cable to give myself six or seven chances to get the fittings on there correctly. Solder, crimp, test, chop it off, strip, re-solder, re-crimp, etc. repeat until I got a signal within tolerance.
Running cable in that building was a headache. No matter where you looked – raised floors, dropped ceilings, or hollow walls – a fistful of existing cables guaranteed to make new runs impossible to identify. I’ll bet half of them had been dark since the 1950s. One of my guys suggested buying a rat, tying a cable to its neck, and training it to run to a flashlight at the other end.
Now I run my house almost entirely on wifi. Someday I’ll hire a guy to install Cat 6 here, and then just stand by and snicker as he tries to work it through the walls. Maybe tell him a few stories of the old days and then yell at him to get off my lawn.
The private library we belong to here in Bangkok, the venerable old Neilson Hays Library, still does all that.
I started out in the world of data processing wiring plugboards on anIBM 407 Accounting Machine. We punched our cards on an IBM 029 Card Punch and if needed, we sorted them on an IBM 82 (or 83) Card Sorter.
This, of course, occurred after fighting off the daily dinosaur attacks. 
[quote=“Gary “Wombat” Robson, post:21, topic:597248”]
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.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah - most of my college programming courses - and my first job - used punch cards. At the first job, we were supposed to write our initial code on coding forms and have them typed up by the data entry clerks, then we would edit the stuff ourselves as appropriate.
I once tried to figure out how big a stack of punch cards would be, to mimic the memory on my 2 gig thumb drive… it would fill most of my house.
I had one course that used paper tape for one specific lab project. That stuff was HORRIBLE.
daylate, I have my father’s K&E Log Log Duplex Decitrig and the manual that came with it, too. Circa 1948.
Oh, my. I had forgotten all about those. And the horrible pain in the neck when a connection was wrong and you had to unwrap the bottom wire on the pin, slide the others down, and rewrap the new one.
Oh, you didn’t have one of the fancy wrapping tools that did the stripping!
I still have my 12" Pickett magnesium slide rule with its leather carrying case and belt strap - and the little 6" pocket-size sliderule they threw in for free when I bought the nice one.
The summer before I started college, I had two part-time jobs. On one of them, I was doing logic simulation programming on a Cray I. On the other, I was writing device drivers for the brand-new S-100 buss microcomputers. So I was simultaneously using one of the largest and one of the smallest computers available.
On the Cray, I had to take a schematic, hand-code each logic gate and the connections between them, and then take the engineer’s test pattern and hand-code all of the inputs. I wrote a program in PL/I that would take the final output from the simulator and create a Sentry test program automatically from it.
On the Imsai/Altair computers, I would hand-toggle a bootstrap program in using the front panel switches to start up the system. Then I took the paper tape containing the assembler and run it through the ASR-33 Teletype machine. Once that was running, I would type in my program, “save” by printing it onto another paper tape, and run it. I did my debugging by stopping the CPU, modifying individual memory locations, and starting it back up again.
I was a producer at a small radio station.
I spliced (physically - razor blade and tape) interviews and ads together, as well as the occasional station ID.
We were also the flagship station for a 5-station college football network. Radio stations would call us and I would plug them in to our feed.
Sigmagirl, that’s the same year I got mine. Cost around $25 IIRC. Think that over the years the manual has been lost.
It fascinates me how many of us have done mechanical pasteup and keyline with all the x-acto knives, waxers, rubylith, stat cameras, boards and falling into a sweaty panic when someone picks up a stack of boards on their way to press and a word falls out. :eek:
Who made a correction and stuck a half-inch long bit of type somewhere instead of having a graf or at least a whole line re-set so the correction would have a fighting chance of remaining stuck to the board in its proper position? Now you have to scan through all the boards, looking for the spot where the word “Tuesday” is missing. And quickly! The pressroom is waiting for those boards so they can make plates and roll.
Fun times at the city newspaper…
All at the same film studio IT gig, I wrote code in COBOL, COBOL-DBMS, and DCL; I translated several programs from FORTRAN to COBOL; and each day had to mount and run the tape that was written by one of my programs.
Damn, that computer room was cold!
ETA: A few years before that I used a keypunch machine and cards, while at school.
My first job was officially assembler programmer on a System/370. But we still had all that tab machine stuff too. I got to do “maintenance programming” on the plugboards and ocasionally whip up a whole new board.
This was the early-mid 1970s. The S/370 assembler job was pretty much state of the art. The plugboards were already obsolete by 15+ years then. And that was 35 years ago now. 35 ordinary years is about 3500 computer technology years.
Hey all you html jockies - Imagine debugging this: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/plugboard.html