2 ms·

Where I was there was no "work from home", you carried a beeper and was expected to fix any issues no matter the time. Overnight there would be a full backup t

by jmclnx 4y ago

Where I was there was no "work from home", you carried a beeper and was expected to fix any issues no matter the time. Overnight there would be a full backup to tape, with the system "off-line" for a few hours. 100,000 records was considered huge (this is in a 5 billion USD company). Some data would be sent using dial-up to various financial institutions. But, the work was very interesting and much more fun compared to today. There were many more different Operating Systems to work with and almost everything was custom code. Now, seems all we do is deal with purchased ERP systems and lots of bureaucracy when issues occur. 30 years ago, we could make changes directly on production systems in emergency situations, now, never. (edit fixed spelling)

lanstin 4y ago
I sometimes got to take the backup tapes to the bank vault. That was fun. SDLC was the dial up, had to set that up for an AS/400 for various things, including downloading patches from IBM. When I had my first service released to live at AOL, in 1997, they gave me a pager and said welcome to operations. I was so pleased with myself. We did have remote work by 97 or 98 tho, tho mostly just while cranking out code, then you c9me in to get your next project. AOL had a nice rhythm of projects were in the three month range from design to deployment. You saw your work used at scale but had time to do it well.
Tangurena2 4y ago
> you carried a beeper We had alphanumeric pagers and in the office was a terminal where one could type all sorts of stuff. Instead, the boss always typed "call shop". Nothing else. I was not willing to pay for a cellphone for myself, so if I got the page during the commute, I just continued on to the office. Where I'd be harangued for failing to find a pay phone (what‽). He always got angrier when I'd type in what he would have said if I had called in. He also got furious when I identified how one customer stole over $30k/year in inventory. That was the most dysfunctional job I ever worked at. This was almost 30 years ago. I had gotten run over by a car and while I was healing, I started dabbling in programming around the office to organize some things that were out of control. Like the filing system was a write-only, read-never system. It would have been cheaper to just shred everything. And to answer the OP... Since it was all Windows stuff, I had to go to book stores and look for Wrox (red covers). Back then, they were decent, but that publisher turned into "shovelware" (a dozen photos on the cover and every chapter written by someone else, with hardly any coherence in the book). Apress ended up replacing them. And now stuff changes so fast, that books are obsolete before they can get through the publishing process. "Source control" usually consisted of making zip archives on floppies. If the place had Source Safe, they better have good backups because SS had a problem corrupting files. At my first "real" job programming, one clown who was responsible for a multi-million dollar product did not like to back up files. Nor use a UPS. So when his hard drive crashed, it turned out that his SourceSafe files were corrupted and we lost about a year's worth of development out of him. That got covered up.

by jmclnx 4y ago

lanstin 4y ago

I sometimes got to take the backup tapes to the bank vault. That was fun. SDLC was the dial up, had to set that up for an AS/400 for various things, including downloading patches from IBM. When I had my first service released to live at AOL, in 1997, they gave me a pager and said welcome to operations. I was so pleased with myself. We did have remote work by 97 or 98 tho, tho mostly just while cranking out code, then you c9me in to get your next project. AOL had a nice rhythm of projects were in the three month range from design to deployment. You saw your work used at scale but had time to do it well.

Tangurena2 4y ago

> you carried a beeper We had alphanumeric pagers and in the office was a terminal where one could type all sorts of stuff. Instead, the boss always typed "call shop". Nothing else. I was not willing to pay for a cellphone for myself, so if I got the page during the commute, I just continued on to the office. Where I'd be harangued for failing to find a pay phone (what‽). He always got angrier when I'd type in what he would have said if I had called in. He also got furious when I identified how one customer stole over $30k/year in inventory. That was the most dysfunctional job I ever worked at. This was almost 30 years ago. I had gotten run over by a car and while I was healing, I started dabbling in programming around the office to organize some things that were out of control. Like the filing system was a write-only, read-never system. It would have been cheaper to just shred everything. And to answer the OP... Since it was all Windows stuff, I had to go to book stores and look for Wrox (red covers). Back then, they were decent, but that publisher turned into "shovelware" (a dozen photos on the cover and every chapter written by someone else, with hardly any coherence in the book). Apress ended up replacing them. And now stuff changes so fast, that books are obsolete before they can get through the publishing process. "Source control" usually consisted of making zip archives on floppies. If the place had Source Safe, they better have good backups because SS had a problem corrupting files. At my first "real" job programming, one clown who was responsible for a multi-million dollar product did not like to back up files. Nor use a UPS. So when his hard drive crashed, it turned out that his SourceSafe files were corrupted and we lost about a year's worth of development out of him. That got covered up.