In 1986 I started a new job. My manager sat me down at a vt102 connected to a PDP-11, pointed to a shelf of orange 4-inch binders and said "That's the system do

In 1986 I started a new job. My manager sat me down at a vt102 connected to a PDP-11, pointed to a shelf of orange 4-inch binders and said "That's the system documentation. Log in by typing "HELLO [7,1]". You're now the PDP expert. Good luck." There was also always the scent of rosin-core in the air because you always needed cables for things. People smoked at their desks in the office, the only place in the office with AC was the server room (backups to tape became more frequent in the summer months for some reason), there was a social protocol to how you handled someone else's listings left on the line printer, and the photocopier was perennially jammed. Building an executable was usually an overnight job run in the batch queue. That's what programming was like in 1987.