I was a runner and an arbitrage clerk at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. As a runner I took the cards from the clerks to the desk where they were entered by the mainframe operators.
Being a clerk was more fun and a lot more hectic. You stood on the edge of the pits and communicated with the the desk and your trader via a modified sign language to buy and sell futures contracts.
I think there might be a couple people left in the Eurodollar pit but the thousands that were there are all gone.
The one in Chicago was the last, I believe. A few years ago I saw a great documentary about its last days.
Two summers I was a courier. Bike and everything.
The first one was for legal stuff. The lawyers would prepare documents and I’d deliver them to other people - didn’t care much who.
The second was medical for a radiology lab. The tech would take the x-ray at a satellite office - there were several - and I’d run it to the doctors where they’d perform the diagnosis.
Now it’s all electronic. Man, I was in the best shape of my life those summers.
Bolding mine.
My very first developer job (S/370 assembler) had as a side-job being trained to maintain the plug boards for a dozen IBM tab machines (e.g.: IBM 402 - Wikipedia) we still had. I was the backup system in case the elderly guy who’d done it full time for years keeled over or quit one day.
I’d have struggled to create a full plug board from scratch, but could troubleshoot failures and make small mods to existing “apps”. That only lasted a couple years before they eliminated the tab machines and the old guy retired.
Still it was kinda cool to be a young guy trained on something at the bitter end of its era. Especially since I wasn’t being single-tracked into that dead end.
Novell Netware Engineer. And a darn good one. I could rip apart that directory and paste it back together in my sleep.
Tech is easy to have obsolete jobs. When Netware went away, I didn’t want to have to learn a new technology so I went into various IT management type jobs. They will never be obsolete. Someone will always be trying to add efficiency, fix root cause, or manage a project or budget.
I do too. But I am pleased that the term “cut 'n paste” followed us into the digital age.
Reading the thread title I expected to see Buggy Whip maker type jobs but a lot of it is technology. Considering a network engineering job is now obsolete is slightly disconcerting, but then again the past 40 years for me has been a constant exercise in keeping up with technology, you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in one place.
Thank you. I, too, wish more people were meticulous about this.
And I need to add, NEVERNEVERNEVER let a caller get away with not giving you his/her number to call back, as in, “Oh, he has my number.” Insist on a number. Some callers have an exaggerated idea of their importance in the contact list of the customer. (Okay, if it’s the spouse, mother, etc., AND you’ve talked to them many times, AND you’re absolutely positive the customer has the number.)
@TriPolar: Yeah, let’s hook some ArcNet together with some frozen yellow garden hose and hang some Netware servers out there via Token-Ring.
It’ll be cool as a zoot suit with a reet pleat. And equally useless in 2015.
I’m sorry I missed out on the days of LORAN; heard stories of annual trips around the world, hauling technicians to various sites.
When I was in college I had a full-time job in a research lab (I was a part-time student). At first I worked with an electron microscopist and a big part of my job was drying specimens. Biological specimens have to be dried without surface tension effects and this is now done using freeze drying. But my boss invented something called critical point drying which I thought had disappeared (an electron microscopist I knew had never heard of it). But when I googled it I discovered it was still used, although one article claimed it was invented in 1971, while I was doing it in 1954.
Later, working in the same lab, I spent two years as the operator of a large vacuum tube analog computer. It was programmed by running cables from between components that I assume is totally obsolete. But my main job was keeping the monster running, mainly by swapping package amplifiers and then replacing the tubes that had burnt out. They were all subminiature tubes that had no bases, but had to unsoldered to take them out and then the replacement soldered in. There were literally thousands of tubes and they were continually burning out. I was told (although never tried to verify) that it was the largest analog computer ever built. Or maybe the largest vacuum tube analog computer.
So you used to work in the RPG industry?
WQE had to repair them at the Department store that I worked at in 1974
I was an elevator operator for a couple of weeks. The regular guy went on vacation, and I volunteered to do the job at an office supply store in Evanston (I was normally a retail sales clerk there.) I can’t recall the last time I saw a manually run elevator outside of that place.
Garden hose won’t work. You need coax with vampire taps.
And don’t forget to gen your IPX drivers.
Aaah yes … IPX drivers. I’d forgotten about that little treat.
Bonus points if you’ve ever wrassled with biaxial.
And when I was quite young, I was the official family Blue Chip Stamp licker. I didn’t actually lick them, but I was the one who stuck them all in the booklets. The local nearby strip-mall-like shopping center (anchored by Vons and Sav-Ons) had a redemption center.
It may have counted then, but not any more. That’s the problem. With the advent of too-smart cash registers, nobody knows how to count any more!
And if your Token-Ring don’t sing . . .
Try connecting it up with a chain of paper clips. One of the vendors engineers told me once that they had tried this back at their shop, just to see what happens. They said it worked, although very slowly. I guess that means a high proportion of corrupted tokens or packets, with lots of re-transmits, but eventually, a good packet would always get through.
A common theme in a lot of these old jobs is that, back in the day, your job consisted of actually doing something as opposed to just sitting in front of a computer workstation clicking things on-screen with a mouse these days.
You olde-tyme PBX operators actually had to plug all those wires into the right holes, take messages, keep track of who was talking and which user was at the end of each of those little holes. (I did PBX for 3 to 5 hours a week for a couple years when I lived at a co-op in college.) Olde-type computer operators (of which I was one) actually ran users’ jobs, kept an eye on them, exercised some discretion about job scheduling, hung tapes, tore print-outs off those huge lumbering (and noisy) printers, separated the outputs, stuffed them into the right pigeon-holes, ran recycled tapes through the degausser, re-booted as needed, did minor routinish troubleshooting, ran the nightly back-ups (I did graveyard shift, which we called Owl Shift), and kept a log of everything in the log-book next to each machine.
Today, when I see job postings for “Computer Operator” it appears to be little other than data-entry, or maybe sitting in front of a CD-ROM burner swapping disks every time the little light blinks.
Similarly for a lot of these other old jobs. You actually got hands on and did something.