Early IT Job Stories

That was how I started a lot longer that 15 years ago - a common task would be oh we have just brought this expensive piece of kit (200% of my yearly salary) its its in that room hook it write any drivers then go and see Bob to work out how to digitize droplets in 3DWhen I worked for a large Telco one of the reasons they employed me was to have an in house sysad for our Primes - we had the largest cluster in the UK running MR back in the early 80'sI rember one of my IBM mates at the t

My boss said the same thing 15 years ago when I worked on a help desk. Why is this noteworthy?

In 97 I was studying in the 2nd year of electrical engineering high school. Every year we had to spend one week in internship at some company. I was with 2 other classmates in some company that did ISDN networks. On the very first morning boss brought notebook with 10 minute PowerPoint presentation on ISDN, told us to watch it and left. We watched it in 10 minutes and waited. He returned 8 hours later and asked us what have we learned. The notebook screen was black so he pressed the spacebar, sc

I worked for a bank long ago. Realtime authorization requests and responses went through an IBM Series/1 box--at the time a stack of computing power in a 6-foot cabinet. It locked up occasionally, choking off communications to/from our auths system. Back then computers lived in a secured super-cooled room and we programmers were forbidden to touch anything but the keyboard. SOP was to call in a tech to "fix" it, meanwhile Visa and MasterCard would "stand in" on our auths, at great expense and gr

Computer janitor is an accurate description for at least one of my previous programming jobs.

As a an intern in an IT summer job in one of the offices from the company that invented the airbag (which had offices in multiples countries etc), the only week I was alone for the whole week, I received a call at 9AM, in english (I'm french and we where in an office in france), where some director told me that a whole 6 production lines from a factory 200km off where down, and that I needed to resolve some firewall issue. I went to a shitty compaq desktop labelled 'firewall' with

This was about 2 decades ago, so not particularly surprising given that the insurance office still used text-based terminals and who knows what on the backend.

I'm old enough that I thought this was related to the old mainframe/UNIX company from the 90s!

Both my parents worked for Burroughs and my father retired from Unisys 20 years ago. I grew up in the server rooms and accidentally pushed the big red emergency shutdown button once when I was about 6. I helped my mom debug COBOL code on our dining room table. I've been in IT for 30 years and it is always amazing to see how much has changed and yet how much hasn't. Thanks for the nostalgia trip.

Where I was there was no "work from home", you carried a beeper and was expected to fix any issues no matter the time. Overnight there would be a full backup to tape, with the system "off-line" for a few hours. 100,000 records was considered huge (this is in a 5 billion USD company). Some data would be sent using dial-up to various financial institutions.But, the work was very interesting and much more fun compared to today. There were many more different Operating Sys