What was IT like when you started?

porkfat · 2022-03-30T18:44:44.000Z

I miss the sound of a 2400 baud modem connecting

I’m glad punch cards are no more except I miss seeing other people drop big stacks of them on the way to the card reader ( always funny )

… I didn’t like it so much when it happened to me though.

tommctomerson · 2022-03-30T18:52:14.000Z

Ransomware was not a thing and as long as you didn’t do something stupid you typically were OK security wise.

dimforest · 2022-03-30T19:03:54.000Z

Computers were for desks only. Now they’re for fridges too.

titusovermyer · 2022-03-30T19:08:36.000Z

I started my first official IT job in 2012 (messed around with computers since 3.1 era though), the world was supposed to end. Guess they were off by 10 years. We had mostly Windows XP Computers with 512 MB to 2GB RAM (Imagine running that now days). Windows 7 was better, but really needed at least 2 GB to run decent. I remember our whole District was running on 45mb internet and we thought that was amazing. YouTube wasn’t as popular so we were actually not having any issues with speed. Especially when I set up a WSUS Server, we no longer had to stagger updates in GPO. Those were simpler times when the problems were mostly hardware related instead of internet related. I spent a lot of time upgrading hardware instead of replacing things. I kinda miss those times.

ich-ni-san · 2022-03-30T19:18:58.000Z

HulkSmash72:

I don’t miss 45 disks to install Windows. One bad disk and you had to start over.

Ugh. I forget about the one bad floppy. You knew it too as soon as you heard the repetitive sound of the read attempts.

@hulksmash72

Jrx1216 · 2022-03-30T19:29:06.000Z

Curtis3363:

Hmm Punch cards 1976, I’m 61 so I’ve seen and done it all.

IBM AS400 with a hard drive the size of a Munsey Manual Transmission

we still have an AS400 in the building I work from… They’re (finally) trying to switch off of it this year, but it literally runs the ERP and 90% of the business applications for the subsidiary company that uses it.

Back on topic though, I used to have this thing called “free time” that I used to congratulate people in the I made the next pepper level thread every time some got spicier… Now when I’m on SW, it’s usually because I’m frustrated with whatever I’m working on and need a break

patti8216 · 2022-03-30T19:40:55.000Z

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eric7615 · 2022-03-30T19:46:02.000Z

Started when XP was still the dominate OS and Vista was just coming out, so I had to survive Vista until windows 7 came out.

wyld · 2022-03-30T19:53:26.000Z

I started out soldering chips to boards and troubleshooting with a meter and oscilloscope. We weren’t IT then, just repair techs and computers weren’t in homes and at desks, they had their own rooms.

Jonathan-Johnson · 2022-03-30T20:11:55.000Z

Windows NT 4.0 had a penchant for wanting to be restarted for every settings change. That spawned this meme (we didn’t know they were called memes back then):

There were a few times I didn’t have to restart, and was quite shocked. Like the time I installed a PCI sound card, and after installing the driver, it just worked without requiring a restart.

And the greatest mystery of all: if you changed the IP address, you had to reboot if the network interface was not connected, but you didn’t have to reboot if the NIC was connected. Lesson learned: plug it in when configuring IP address. Even into a hub (not a switch back then) with nothing else connected was OK; as long as there was a link you didn’t have to restart.

EDIT: The last time I installed a new NT 4.0 server, I counted the number of times I had to reboot (between configurations, drivers, service packs, and updates). It was somewhere between 20 and 30 reboots before I could declare the installation of Windows complete, even before installing any line-of-business software!

Jonathan-Johnson · 2022-03-30T20:17:28.000Z

Circa 1991, I got a new PC, a 486DX with 4 MB (yes, megabytes) of RAM. Shortly thereafter, I installed Slackware Linux 1.0 (with kernel 1.0.0) over a serial connection from a friend’s Linux box. Dual boot between Linux and DOS (with LiLo), if I remember right.

A year or so later I snagged a great deal on some used RAM – another 4 MB – for only $100. That made for 8 MB (8 sticks 1 MB each). Instead of taking X ten minutes to load, it took only two! Woohoo! What a screamin’ machine!

HulkSmash · 2022-03-30T20:29:48.000Z

Ohhhh 486DX with 4MB - sweet machine!

Jonathan-Johnson · 2022-03-30T20:33:37.000Z

Since I’m on a roll…

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I captured this helpful error dialog from an NT 4.0 server…

Anyone remember the Capacitor Plague of the early to mid-2000s?

kevinhughes2 · 2022-03-30T22:05:46.000Z

I don’t miss adapter cards (sound, video, network …) where you had to physically move jumpers and be aware of the resources every card was using - one bad setting on a new card and nothing would work till you fixed it. And today’s driver issues … don’t make me laugh.
I don’t miss netware, Hercules Graphics Cards, Sideways (you needed a program to print Lotus 123 spreadsheets in landscape mode), Arcnet.

I do miss the time when the College computer labs closed at 9PM, and being one of the lucky ones with a 300 baud modem, I could dial in and have a VAX 11/780 all to myself after they closed. I also miss Pascal … the compiler was a cranky bastard that forced you to be painfully explicit in your programming style.

Of course, the things I don’t miss now were essential tools back then. People today would totally lose it watching output appear on the screen almost character by character in the 300 baud days.

kevinhughes2 · 2022-03-30T22:05:46.000Z

I don’t miss adapter cards (sound, video, network …) where you had to physically move jumpers and be aware of the resources every card was using - one bad setting on a new card and nothing would work till you fixed it. And today’s driver issues … don’t make me laugh.
I don’t miss netware, Hercules Graphics Cards, Sideways (you needed a program to print Lotus 123 spreadsheets in landscape mode), Arcnet.

I do miss the time when the College computer labs closed at 9PM, and being one of the lucky ones with a 300 baud modem, I could dial in and have a VAX 11/780 all to myself after they closed. I also miss Pascal … the compiler was a cranky bastard that forced you to be painfully explicit in your programming style.

Of course, the things I don’t miss now were essential tools back then. People today would totally lose it watching output appear on the screen almost character by character in the 300 baud days.

PatrickFarrell · 2022-03-30T23:05:17.000Z

From just when I was starting as an IT person vs personal experience (which would include things like Commodore 64s)

IRQs, DMAs, knowing the pin outs for 9 and 25 pin serial cables for when you needed to make your own, or make a null modem cable.

Having to low level format hard drives with
debug
g=c800:5

Converting an MFM hard disk from 2:1 to 1:1 interleave after a controller upgrade by using Spinrite. Knowing the difference between MFM and RLL.

ST-412/506, ESDI, SCSI, IDE. 2 foot long stringy internal SCSI cables with 7 connectors on them and a terminating resistor at the end.

ISA, VLB, Microchannel, PCI

Knowing the AT command set for a Hayes or USRobotics modem where you used commands like AT&FB0X4&A3&C1&D2&M4&H1&K1&B1&R2S7=60

Artisoft Lantastic

Trumpet Winsock

mIRC (or BitchX if you were a Linux user)

Downloading drivers from a manufacturers BBS.

Remembering that Microsoft had a cooler rock logo from 1980-1992

Novell drivers on DOS. Coax network cabling for Arcnet and Ethernet. Terminator resisters on Coax Ethernet.

8" floppy disks and Disk packs.

Vax 8600. Dec Ultrix and also VMS.

Windows 1.0, Windows 286, Windows 386.
Norton Desktop for Windows

Word Perfect, Lotus 123.

Harvard Graphics (I felt a couple of “Oh yeah I forgot about that” feelings out there.), Aldus Persuasion, Lotus Freelance Graphics

Laplink

SCO Xenix

A scanner addon for a dot matrix printer where you replaced the print head with a scanner head and it scanned line by line.
Daisy wheel printers.
Line printers.
Greenbar printer paper.

2 horizontal lines across the screen on large Aperture Grill based monitors (ex: Sony Trinitron, NEC Multisync)

Hercules Graphics cards, CGA, EGA, VGA. Ati VGA Wonder, S3, Voodoo, Nvidia Riva 128

Corel Draw, Aldus Pagemaker
pkzip/pkunzip, pkpack/pkunpack, arj, uharc, lha

AOL, ICQ for messaging

So many memories.

SkiFree

steve-elc · 2022-03-30T23:11:05.000Z

White boxes with an unmarked reset button. Cases came with stickers for the buttons. As a wholesaler we built and supplied and now and then the “Any Key” sticker was placed where the reset button was.

The poor buggers using windows and seeing the message “Press Any Key”

Looking back we were nasty lol

markwilliams3 · 2022-03-30T23:22:41.000Z

PDP8 with paper tape in high school (1976) and FORTRAN on punchcards in basement of math science building at Purdue on a CDC mainframe.

Networking on AppleTalk and then PhoneNet before I saved up enough to go to 2MHz Ethernet on Coax with BNC connectors. Still have one of these in my toolbox…

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markwilliams3 · 2022-03-30T23:44:59.000Z

A mixed network of Apple HFS, Win NT4 and NFS on SCO Unix in 1994. My entire corporate Infrastructure ran on two rack mount servers with (2) Pentium Pro 200MHz processors on NT Server 4 and SCO Open Enterprise 5 and a PowerTower Mac Clone with daughterboard second CPU running Helix database on Mac and Foxbase on SCO. ALL on Raptor HDD’s that had at best an 8-10 month lifespan. Could backup everything to two 4GB DAT tapes. Recovery to baremetal from tape was a frequent exercise.

Backups ran on Dantz Retrospect and SCO on Cactus Airbag and Backup Exec (not the Symantec one) software by some guys in a strip mall in Myrtle Beach who eventually became UniTrend.

Tower of Hanoi was the great grandfather of all backup strategies.

The-Sith-Admin · 2022-03-31T01:21:48.000Z

hmmm…as a job was in the Army where I had to dig into the card rack and configure dipswitches based on whether it was NATO, negotiation rate, etc.