Friday, July 30, 2021, is the 22nd annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. to commemorate this special international day of thanks for System Administrators – here are 7 signs you have been in IT for too long. Apologies to Jeff Foxworthy.
If you still “burn” CDs – You have been in IT for too long
Have you burned critical files to a CD (or DVD) as a backup? There was always the risk of an unreadable disk, especially if you used rewritable (CD/R+) media or cheap media. Writing in one device and reading in another could be tricky too. Good luck getting a new computer with a CD reader in it to read those disks if you still have any.
If you still have a box of floppies – You have been in IT for too long
Floppy disks were called that because they were floppy. You could bend them. They come in different sizes. In my first tech job, I spent a lot of time with 8-inch floppies IML-ing (rebooting) IBM equipment. Image the amazement when the 3.5-inch rigid floppy disk that held 1.44 MB came along. A full Windows 95 install required 21 1.44 MB floppy disks (and several hours).
If you know what a modem sounds like – You have been in IT for too long
Before the days of cable modems and 5G we had to connect to the Internet with phone lines. The modem would convert the computer’s digital signals to some analog noise, that would be transmitted through the wires and reconverted to digital again on the other side. A typical connection speed was 9.6 kbps.
If you know how to disable call waiting – You have been in IT for too long
If you ever had to use *70,,xxx-xxxx to disable call waiting (rb- Yes- only seven digits too). You had to add these special characters to your modem dial string to prevent call-waiting from dropping your glorious 9.6 kbps connection in the middle of an AOL session.
If your coffee mugs have logos on them – You have been in IT for too long
Before COVID killed tradeshows – you could always score a few coffee mugs for SWAG at trade shows. Now I am going to have washout my coffee mugs.
If you know what a punch card is – You have been in IT for too long
Before personal computers were a thing, companies used mainframes. In order to program the mainframe, people had to use punch cards that could hold 80 columns of data. They would need to punch a deck of cards, keep them in order and feed them to a reader.
I never had to deal with punch cards in the workplace. I did take a Business Computing class and did have to write a “hello world” COBOL program. That was enough.
If you played Pong – You have been in IT for too long
I remember going to Sears and getting Pong. We came home and attached the splitter thing to the antenna terminals on the back of the TV, turned the dial to Channel 3 (rb- No remote controls in those days) and presto we were playing PONG for hours. Sure looking back at the low-resolution images (sometimes a ball would look more like a square), the 3 monotones of the blob moving back and forth, and controllers with just one button, pale to what an Xbox puts out. But it was a lot of fun for an 8-year-old.
rb-
All of these things on the list were disruptive in their day. But they were all solving problems, helping us move forward and get to the point we are today.
Related article
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.