The way we were, or, IT (and office life) in the 20th Century – Part 1 - kit

It’s nearly 30 years since I starting working in IT – a scary thought.  What’s even scarier is that I could face almost another 20 years working life before I get to retire.  Note that I didn’t suggest I would still be working in IT…  These days I sit under the shadow / glare of a 6ft interactive whiteboard which is basically one of the biggest TV’s I’ve ever seen (and the pride of our team). 

Our interactive "whiteboard" - glowing with pride

I get zillions of emails every day, most of which go straight through to my junk mail folder, and I can communicate via video links with people all over the globe at the click of a mouse button.  Generally, “all over the globe” most commonly means Normoss, a suburb of the Greater Blackpool metropolitan area, but it could be India, Australia or the US… Anywhere.  Back in the early 80’s all of this stuff was the work of science fiction and Q from James Bond…

The fact is that our working lives have changed immeasurably compared to the days back in the early 80’s – some, but not all, for the better.  So I thought it would be entertaining to ramble on a bit and mull over the differences between our present 3D reality and the days when phones hadn’t yet become mobile, TV screens larger than 26” were considered infeasibly large, and we’d only just got a 4^th Channel on the tele.  Sky was the cloudy bit above the land and the sea (occasionally blue in the UK) and if Rupert Murdoch was hacking a phone it would presumably be with a knife or an axe…  This blog may not be that interesting for the vast majority of my readership (all 3 of them) but it will entertain me (sad or what?).

There are a lot of places to start this off so I thought I’d kick off with kit – or the lack of it back then.  These days almost every office employee is equipped with a desktop at least.  Some will have a laptop and, as if that weren’t enough, smart-phones and tablet pc’s.  Most of this is essential to our working lives and, for some, ALL of it is.  And that’s fair enough because they make us more productive so we get things done much more quickly.  Actually, I don't even go on holiday without a notebook these days.   But it wasn’t always like this…

First of all though, I just want to make it clear that I don’t go that far back into computing history as far as my working life goes.  So I don’t remember computers like this…

Manchester Uni (Alma Mater) Mark 1 computer

Nor did I ever have to work this this stuff, although we did play with it a bit in my 1^st year of Uni (as a bit of a history lesson)…

Paper tape (as seen on old films)

As a student I did have some short dealings with the following cards but only for a couple of weeks programming Fortran.. (Ithink Fortran 66...)

Good old holorith cards - a staple of the (now) 60+ techy

So, none of that old nonsense.  Back in 1982, and for some time after that, "the desktop" meant the top of one’s desk and nothing more.  For a mere mortal this was generally a veneer of some cheap indeterminate wood, probably chipped and almost certainly stained by spilt, coffee, tea or ink.  More senior people would have their desk topped with a large sheet of glass – not entirely sure why that was seen as a better thing to do but that was the way it worked.  On top of the desk would be various pieces of stationery – paper, pens, pencils, etc.  The ubiquitous desk diary would be lying around somewhere, possibly a photo of the wife and kids (I had neither at the time), and for some people there would be an essential of working life - the ashtray.  Some “busy” people would probably have mounds and mounds of paper on their desks – quite often computer listings.  The one thing that you wouldn’t see on the desk was what we now call a desktop because, although they had been invented, they were very expensive and our applications weren’t designed to make use of them at the time.   

"Kit" generally only lived in “special” rooms.  They were the data centres and, sensibly we were kept away from them.  Our access to the vast computing power was via terminals and these were all housed in the terminal room. 

A typical terminal room, although they were usually smokier than this

Note the apt black and white shot although these places also existed in colour.  Because there were only so many terminals and there were plenty of us coding types, it was necessary to have a terminal booking system.  No surprises to find out that this was a sheet of marked out paper… You could only book 30-60 minutes at a time to give everyone a chance to use the things.  So you got maybe 3 goes on one in an average day.  This was probably just as well because the atmosphere in them wasn't that healthy.  They were generally quite smoky and stuffy but there was an advantage that they were a good place to hide from the boss...

So how , I hear you ask, did we find time to type in all that code?  Well the answer was that we didn’t…  We wrote out our code on 80 character wide sheets of pre-printed stationery.  Those sheets then got taken (I think the typists took them) to the Redifon team (I think Redifon was the agency we used for "data collection" which means people typing stuff in for us) who typed the coding sheets in.  We had special notation to differentiate 1 and I, O and 0 - in fact you still see some old coders put a slash through a 0 in case anyone gets confused.  So, in the course of developing a program, the first you saw of it on a computer system was the version typed in by the Redifon dept.  This was generally not exactly what you had written so job number one was to correct the errors before anything compiled.  And so it went on.  I do wonder now how we ever got things done but, thinking about it, we probably didn’t get THAT much done.  Happy but somewhat unproductive times…

Typical Honeywell terminal which we usede for many happy (?) years

In the mid 80’s we started to get more terminals which were split out by teams – so each team had a couple of terminals.  Just like the one above one… This gave us more terminal time so the coding sheets started to get dropped as we keyed stuff in for ourselves - the beginning of the end for the typists...  We also had basic word processing capabilities on new machines called “PCs”.  A few of these started to appear and some of us got to use them but mainly they replaced the typewriters that the typists used.  So, younger analysts (I was soon to become one) keyed in their design documents and specs on the PCs whilst the older ones continued to hand write them and feed them to typists…  Great fun.

The next leap towards the future was the introduction of the portable computer.  This wasn’t a laptop, yet, as you can see.  These were produced by Compaq and available to buy from about 1983,  I suspect we started buying them 2 or 3 years after that.  Portable was just about plausible.  They weighed in at just under 30 pounds (about 13kg kiddies) so they were as portable as a sack of spuds – the  screens were pretty pathetic as well.  Why they didnt put wheels on them I don't know.  You could book them out to work at home (at evenings and weekends – nobody “worked from home” in those days) but you could really only get them off site if you had a car parked nearby.  No way would they have seen atrain journey home.  Still, they got used and some (very senior) people had them in favour of desktops… 

The dawn of the personal computer as an everyday working tool (as above) was only round the corner and soon things like this appeared on more and more desks – the “workstation” was born and we have never looked back…  Well, maybe occasionally…