I Helped Create a Monster! IT Guru...

[JethroB]

I spent the first half of my accounting career on the IBM S36 and then AS (Baby)36. My company bought a JD Edwards software
package in 1985 along with the source code as they had discontinued it for $50,000. Boy did we ever get our moneys worth out of that software, 15 years.

 

[Racenut]

30 years of IT and still going... I used to love it. Now I question my career choices daily. If I could have the job without all the responsibility, would still be a good time. But when the phone rings in the middle of the night... I hate it.

 

[riptides]

Back in the day, computers would fill rooms. Storage, Calculating Processors and CPU's were their own box farms. And the cooling systems were pretty impressive too. Paper tape, Card Reads and toggles required to boot. Certification that you have completed "boot training" was a plus.

One of my best know mistakes, I fell into a pattern, "Do you want to format the flight pack?" YES.

That put some serious hardware in safe mode. LOL. Someone had switched disk plugs on me when I was not looking. Yeah...disk plugs...the one with the "0" is the one that was being used at the time.

Always check your plugs against the label. Never format a flight pack.

 

[riptides]

I remember getting service notices about a problem with some version of Windows that would cause the system to lock up if it wasn't rebooted every 29 days or something like that.

Our biggest question was how did anyone get a windows system to stay up long enough to find that problem? :laughing:

Uptime was always important to customers. I had one call that required a flight out of town. While examining the system the datacenter manager asked me not to lean on a particular microVAX. Since it was in the particular systems floorspace I inquired as to "what it is?". The response "I don't know". That set off another investigation. Turned out that little microVAX had been honoring x25 gateway load requests for years. It ran out of disk space, and the show memory command had nothing but asterisks for all its resource monitors. But it was still running. We also had to track down the x25 gateways to turn them off. There were over eight of them, on different parts of the planet! I should have captured the monitor displays, as uptime back then was a serious competitive edge. It would have made computer news back then.

 

[Frankenkubota]

These are the days of miracle and wonder!

So happy to hear SW people rag about tech.

 

[czechsonofagun]

These are the days of miracle and wonder!

So happy to hear SW people rag about tech.

Thirty years of IT and I keep the important stuff - like my reloading data, tractor maintenance, implement and project drawings, etc. on paper in pencil.

 

[Frankenkubota]

Thirty years of IT and I keep the important stuff - like my reloading data, tractor maintenance, implement and project drawings, etc. on paper in pencil.

That, imho, is a good idea. Pretty much every invoice and stmt i get is in paper and everyone says, go paperless. That's great until you actually need to see the invoice and

A....Can't find it

B......Powers out again

c.....Our networks down

D.....Our IT dept is working on it.....

E....fill in the blank

Once in the 80s it took me almost a full year to get the cable tv co to stop charging me and that I was current. I'd lost all my data on the pewter so i was helpless.

*Good thing I had all my data on bubble memory! maybe not

 

[jmc]

^^^^

E....The company wanting you to go paperless only keeps your records for two years.

 

[cdaigle430]

That, imho, is a good idea. Pretty much every invoice and stmt i get is in paper and everyone says, go paperless. That's great until you actually need to see the invoice and

A....Can't find it

B......Powers out again

c.....Our networks down

D.....Our IT dept is working on it.....

E....fill in the blank

Once in the 80s it took me almost a full year to get the cable tv co to stop charging me and that I was current. I'd lost all my data on the pewter so i was helpless.

*Good thing I had all my data on bubble memory! maybe not

I still have punch cards LOL

 

[Oaktree]

One of my best know mistakes, I fell into a pattern, "Do you want to format the flight pack?" YES.

That put some serious hardware in safe mode. LOL. Someone had switched disk plugs on me when I was not looking. Yeah...disk plugs...the one with the "0" is the one that was being used at the time.

Always check your plugs against the label. Never format a flight pack.

Not familiar with the term "flight pack", but yeah I remember those old CDC drives with the drive # plugs on them. The large drives' packs must have weighed 40 lb and had a whopping capacity of 300meg (unformatted). The smaller ones were 80 I believe. In the early 70s we worked with drum memory drives...a unit the size of a washing machine had 8m capacity! Could barely store a Word document or an mp3 file on it today, but back then we thought it was huge. If you had a head crash, heaven help you...the whole unit had to be shipped back to the factory.

Someone mentioned tiptoeing around disc drives. Yeah, those did experience a lot of head crashes. Always hated it when some idiot would either cycle a crashed pack thru several drives or conversely cycle several (formerly) good packs thru a crashed drive. Job security for the technician!!

So happy to hear SW people rag about tech.

I worked in a tech field for most of my working life, and I think that's the major reason (with a smattering of crabby old guy) why I have no interest in so much of the modern tech gadgetry..."smart" homes, etc. Don't even have a smart phone, nor do I want one. I think I'm just "teched" out.
Yeah, I'll check out something that looks like it might improve my life, but so much of it just seems to be clutter.