Obsolete skills

[AnalogKid2DigitalMan]

For us that are 'older than dirt' who can probably relate to a greater percentage of these, a trip down memory lane

http://obsoleteskills.com/Skills/Skills

I disagree that some of the items are truly obsolete, but a fun read regardless. A lot of technology related topics.

Should we add "Programming in a text-based language"?

Have fun!

-AK2DM

[Graziano]

I really liked zipping archives across multiple floppy disks

graziano

[altenbach]

As a sign of the times, autoexec.bat editing has been slowly replaced by labview.ini editing. 😄

[Gabi1]

i dont know if it is in there:

listening to the loading of a file into a micro1 computer!

this was in the mid 80's, and i had this micro1 keyboard with about 4KB of memory, to plug directly to the TV. to save a file, one had to connect a tape recorder, and press record!. to load it, one had to listen to it while it was loading. sounds very much like sending a fax.

now that was fun!

[Gabi1]

found it:

Loading Data From A Cassette Tape

Field	Computing
Went Obsolete	1990s
Made Obsolete By	Floppy Disk technology
Knowledge Assumed	Audio tones; the vagaries of rotary volume/tone controls
When useful	Retro/Lo-Fi DJing?

Having connected your gran's (ideally mono) 'portable' cassette recorder - the size of a hardback dictionary - to your, eg, ZX Spectrum via paired mono jack plugs (one for mic, one for ear), you had to adjust the volume level and the tone (lo to hi) in order to find an acceptable pair of levels that the clunky 8-bit, 48k squishboard could understand.

Fail to adjust these correctly and your software transfer would fail rudely, four and a half minutes later, just 3 kilboytes and 24 seconds from completion.

[Ray.R]

What about the guy who lit all the oil lamps along the streets before electricity 😉

I'm not "that" old...  😄

But I do recall:

1.  the guys responsible for putting the stacks of cards for the automated keypunch machines,

2.  the guys placing the memory tapes upon library request

3.  the guys replacing the huge disk platters in the original disk drives...  and 5-1/4" would have been small in those days... I think they were 16 inches..

Message Edited by JoeLabView on 03-09-2008 06:56 PM

[altenbach]

Next time you drop a FFT node on the diagram, have a look at the 1972 state-of-the art Nicolet 1080 series:

"The speed of Fourier transformation is approximately 100 seconds for a 32K transformation,

47 seconds for a 16K, 22 seconds for an 8K, or 10 seconds for a 4K transformation."

Of course to even do a 4K FFT, you had to upgrade to the 1082 model with 8K words x 20bits of core_memory.

(from http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/nicolet/1080/nicolet1080.pdf)

Note that the "high speed reader" referred to reading the punched paper tape. 😉

Message Edited by altenbach on 03-09-2008 04:51 PM

[Ben]

Ray wrote

"...

3.  the guys replacing the huge disk platters in the original disk drives...  and 5-1/4" would have been small in those days... I think they were 16 inches..

..."

Yep 16 inch platters spun at 3600 RPMs and the big ones stored 512 Megabytes. The Silicon Valley Handbook featured a CDC 9766 on the front cover and included a comment "You know you are a SVG (Silicon Valley Guy) if you think of laundry-mats as a 'place where they have rows and rows of coin operated disk drives' ". Back then head-crashes really ment something because repairing same invloved removing the shrapnel that had imbedded themselves in the circuit boards.

RE Christians photo

The magnetic tapes were encoded such that they could be read forward or backwards, just to increase theier speed (at least DEC's version).

That printer is a Teletype ASR-33. I used those on my first four serious computer systems. It was the user interface for the mark 85 digitial computer (24K of core memory) that controlled the Nato-Sea Sparrow Missle System that is still in service with the US Navy (now known as "Sea-Chicken").

Second and third system still used the ASR-33 which were proprietary alarm systems built by Diebold Inc (of election fame). I still have a set of feeler guages used to repair the ASR-33's. Important note: DO NOT try to punch mylar tape on one of these critters. It will work the first time. I eventually converted the machine over to loading its code from floopy drive instead of papaer tape. (THis was a luxury since core memory only need reloaded if you replaced it or changed the code).

The last systems that used the ASR-33 was the Diebolds Tabs 210 (Cash machine) were a log of all of the transactions were printed.

"Oh for the old days" when if you wanted to control the volume of your computer, you would throw a coat over the teletype.

So I guess that

1) Repairing disk drives

2) Servicing teletypes

3) Performing Crash-dump analysis

all qualify as obsolete skills.

Ben

Message Edited by Ben on 03-10-2008 08:31 AM

Message Edited by Ben on 03-10-2008 08:33 AM

[Ray.R]

Do you realize that "consultants" back in 1980 that serviced mainframes earned $200/hr..??..

Try earning that these days..  

So does having experience at using punch cards, having used tapes for storage media, or the original 8-in floppies that you actually had to flip to use the other side, or writing your own OS, or writing your own database software, or knowing APL, or designing analog computers make you obsolete???

I'm sure kids these days think that microwave ovens have been around forever..  And that videogames have always existed...  😄 LOL!

[Ben]

"

Do you realize that "consultants" back in 1980 that serviced mainframes earned $200/hr..??..

"

DEC charged $250 an hour if you did not have a contract.

All of the experience is still of use from time to time. Particulary the Crash dump analysis since Windows was based on the VMS model. THe younguns around here find it interesting that I can do binary to octal or hex conversion in my head. This still comes in handy when trying to reverse engineer protocols since I can see the byte patterns in different forms.

Ben