10 Years in IT

[IanT]

I've been in IT since 2003 (Aged 18)..................2010 now.....things have changed!

[Guest Guest]

15" CRT Screens - Still have a few of them

15" CRT screen covers (remember them!) - have one in woodwork

Mice with balls in - still have a few

Hubs - just got rid of our last 2 weeks ago!

10Mbps network cards - until 2 weeks ago the network cabling was so bad there were a fair few NICs running at 10mb half duplex

Low end Celeron processors as standard in school PCs - pretty much par here

 

Yep, i love my school. And they wonder why nothing works!

[PiqueABoo]

Paper tape is more than 10 years surely, but I've got a souvenir strip in one of those little plastic cases you kept it in. Roughly around 2000 it was..

 

..finally getting rid of peripheral cards where a firmware upgrade meant blowing a new EEPROM and swapping it in e.g. early Adaptec SCSI.. and all the cables etc. that went with the initial SCSI generation

..and of course those similarly big/clunky Centronics printer cables.

..I had a DOS machine in the corner for occasionally still useful "this and that" (it had required a Y2K patch though)

..word processors were pretty much the same as they are now

..ditto for Windows but I was seven years into Windows NT family, we didn't do that 9x tat.

..VMWare was a fun new toy

..so were disk based MP3 player/recorders.

..you could no longer fit a reasonably full Usenet feed down a 56Kbps link coz of the recent increases in MP3s and porn volumes (videos were taking off).

 

..schools, specifically their students (or at least that's who they blamed when you tracked them down) were becoming a significant pain on the net forum I used to babysit.

 

CRTs as noted and I suppose home net bandwidth got much cheaper/faster (I had "free for life" dial-up then which then got charged for!) but I don't think that much has changed in the last decade.

[solitaire89]

Reminds me of my first mobile phone.

 

The first mobile phone I remember was like a proper telephone - i.e. with a cradle and a curly wire etc - you get the picture. It took ages to charge, and then would only last 10 mins or so.... That was the "office mobile phone", in my Dad's office! What a flash back, with typewriters and no computers - wow! I would only have been like 8...

[creese]

The first mobile phone I remember was like a proper telephone - i.e. with a cradle and a curly wire etc - you get the picture. It took ages to charge, and then would only last 10 mins or so.... That was the "office mobile phone", in my Dad's office! What a flash back, with typewriters and no computers - wow! I would only have been like 8...

 

My friend had one. In such a short time we now have the Android and that other phone, who would have foreseen that?

[solitaire89]

My friend had one. In such a short time we now have the Android and that other phone, who would have foreseen that?

 

I think that frequently! Not just about phones and computers, but like the fact that the likes of my Grandmother (well, her family) didn't have a fridge as a child... I don't think of the fridge as something recent, but I suppose it is in the grand scheme of things!

[GrumbleDook]

Jan 99 for me ... before that I shouted at people for a living.

 

Apple Mac LC, LCII and LCIIIs, 6xxxs, 5xxxs, Mac OS 7.5.5, MacAdmin 1 & MacPrefect, Win95 locked down by reg hacks, separate admin network on NT 4, Cat3 in some classrooms, Solaris 2.6,

 

First day was stripping down an Apple Laserwriter and the afternoon was rebuilding an 8150 Apple Workgroup Server.

[SYNACK]

PC software that came in BIIIIIIG boxes!

 

I submit into evidence my own personal copy of Visual Basic Professional 3.0 with groundbreakingly modern features like OLE2, full Windows 3.1 native 16bit support and three giagantic manuals.

 

Redbull provided for scale.

 

I think that I have been being paid to do this kind of stuff for about 14 years as I started getting paid for it while I was still in High School.

Edited May 19, 2010 by SYNACK

[creese]

but like the fact that the likes of my Grandmother (well, her family) didn't have a fridge as a child... I don't think of the fridge as something recent, but I suppose it is in the grand scheme of things!

 

My maternal grandparents had at best a slab of marble or stone to keep the milk and cheese as cold as possible. With no supermarkets and most shopping done at the 'corner' shop (GGGGGG-Granvill) no one bought a whole week of groceries. Their shop was about 4 doors up.

[solitaire89]

My maternal granparents had at best a slab of marble or stone to keep the milk and cheese as cold as possible. With no supermarkets and most shopping done at the 'corner' shop (GGGGGG-Granvill) no one bought a whole week of groceries. Their shop was about 4 doors up.

 

Gees - when mothers could stay at home with their kids - I knew I was born in the wrong era!

[solitaire89]

Oooh I remember those. My OH had to lug them across London when he was a trainee accountant going to audits. Not exactly portable!

 

Only just seen this - does he want one now?!

[creese]

And before anyone else does................ We used to live in shoe box int middle of road.

[elsiegee40]

Only just seen this - does he want one now?!

 

I'll suggest it to him when he gets back tonight. Old times sake and all that!

[PiqueABoo]

Solaris 2.6

 

That (earlier more loved version) was pretty much what you ended up with to run your own DNS etc. when you got a business Internet link in the days when it was mostly Pipex for business and Demon for home. Found the Internet guide Pipex give you the other week, inside which was a copy of usage agreement we had to fill out for NSFnet in order to access a significant portion of the Internet.

[Rydra]

10 years ago...

 

where all a student had to do to hack your system was pull the network cable out on login, or just escape

 

Oh the fun times of playing unreal tournament, quake 3, and various motorcross style games

[cookie_monster]

Just found CDs for NT4 server, Workstation, options pack and SP6a. Along with 95, 98, ME, 2000 Pro and server. I don't know why but I feel I just have to keep them all!

 

 

Daft isn't it I've still got all of the NT4 MCSE books I just can't seem to throw them away

[Domino]

And before anyone else does................ We used to live in shoe box int middle of road.

 

A shoebox?

 

We used to DREAM of living in a shoebox...we thought people in shoeboxes were snobs!

[elsiegee40]

Daft isn't it I've still got all of the NT4 MCSE books I just can't seem to throw them away

 

I finally chucked away all my DB2, CICS and PL/1 manuals last summer... it's more than 10 years since I had anything to do with any of them! It was hard, but we needed the space in the loft!

[cookie_monster]

I finally chucked away all my DB2, CICS and PL/1 manuals last summer... it's more than 10 years since I had anything to do with any of them! It was hard, but we needed the space in the loft!

 

 

Ruthless

[broc]

I cut my teeth programming Fortran, then PL/1, before becoming a systems programmer where I learned Assembler. I still have a vintage set of IBM manuals and Redbooks on CDROM.....

[steve]

I was think just the other day how much USB ports have changed IT for us over the last few years -

 

DIN5 keyboards

Serial mice

serial analogue modems

ISDN modems

DIN5 barcode scanners

parallel port CF card readers

 

Data portability was limited to CDs, a parallel port drive if you were rich - none of your USB drives back then.

 

And how expensive things were - £10 for a blank CD-R that actually had gold leaf on it, £100+ for a 4x CD drive, £250 for an HP500 deskjet printer.

[PEO]

so far all the machines we have installed dont have floppy drives, and only the staff workstations had dvd rom drives.

 

I look forward to the day when computers have no mechanical components for a resonable price

 

dvd rom drives, cpu fans, psu fans and mechanical hdd are always the first to die and cause problems after 1 - 2 year

[elsiegee40]

I cut my teeth programming Fortran, then PL/1, before becoming a systems programmer where I learned Assembler. I still have a vintage set of IBM manuals and Redbooks on CDROM.....

 

I was a SysProg for just under 10 years, but with a database specialism. I didn't do that much Assembler... and if you've got those red books on CDRom, they're not originals!

[tech_guy]

I've just had 2 of these dumped on my desk!

Compaq I Portable computer

They're not exactly the same, but that's what they look like on the surface of it... Very large paperweight anyone?

 

Eek - I wrote my thesis on one of those!!

[Dos_Box]

Daft isn't it I've still got all of the NT4 MCSE books I just can't seem to throw them away

 

Just got rid of mine last year. Did you notice just how slim they were compared to the 2000, 2003 books!!! NT4.0 MCSE was a doddle!!