[HN Gopher] Office Life in the 1980's (Vintage Photos) (2019)
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       Office Life in the 1980's (Vintage Photos) (2019)
        
       Author : accrual
       Score  : 42 points
       Date   : 2023-11-26 18:08 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (weare.guru)
 (TXT) w3m dump (weare.guru)
        
       | bmitc wrote:
       | Seems kind of nice, especially knowing that computers were used
       | to augment human work rather than something to slave humans to.
       | This is clear, from these photos at least, since the computer is
       | not the primary mode of interaction between people and either
       | things (like paper) or other people.
        
         | genman wrote:
         | I presume that in many cases the paper was everything. Remember
         | the term "paper pusher"?
        
       | jimjimjim wrote:
       | 1980's. vintage. Well, I guess. Technically it counts as vintage,
       | but it makes me feel like the cryptkeeper.
        
         | ncr100 wrote:
         | /s Who is the cryptkeeper? OH a 1990's tele-vision puppet who
         | would scare children!
         | 
         | Being old [and i'm hardly that] gets tiring sometimes. Too much
         | to noodle upon.
        
       | phatfish wrote:
       | They seem to have gone all in with the aesthetic and used a
       | server from the 80s too.
        
       | cheema33 wrote:
       | Box of floppies on many disks. They were so common. I had many of
       | them. Floppies were a very stubborn technology. They wouldn't die
       | as much as I wished them to. And for the longest time, they were
       | the only way to flash BIOS on many systems.
       | 
       | Floppies, CDs, DVDs, PCMCIA cards, modems, CGA cards, MFM
       | controllers, mechanical mice, ISA bus, parallel port, internal
       | combustion engine... Things I used a lot. But do not miss at all.
       | Good riddance.
        
         | pixl97 wrote:
         | God floppies were the worst. When you're on disk 18 of 20 and
         | you get a bad sector... good times.
         | 
         | Oh, and the once or twice a month you had to clean your mice
         | balls because to much crust was building up inside them.
         | 
         | As many complaints as I have about wireless and bluetooth they
         | are still far more reliable than most of that 80s-start of 2000
         | stuff unless it was eye wateringly expensive equipment.
        
           | baz00 wrote:
           | Gah I remember that. When I was first playing around with
           | Linux at home I didn't have an Internet connection and the
           | only way I could get it was relaying floppies back and
           | forward from the university campus. This was about a mile
           | walk from home. Of course I learned to verify the floppies
           | very quickly after the first round trip back to the campus
           | with a duff one. Also there was a pub half way which was a
           | serious latency issue.
           | 
           | I'd used floppies for years before and they were probably all
           | half duff but I'd never noticed.
        
             | jacquesm wrote:
             | > Also there was a pub half way which was a serious latency
             | issue.
             | 
             | Well, at least the packets got forwarded eventually.
        
               | baz00 wrote:
               | On at least one occasion they got left in the pub!
        
               | jacquesm wrote:
               | That makes it even funnier!
               | 
               | I once bought an ex undercover police vehicle that came
               | with a folder that somehow had been forgotten under the
               | passenger seat. Contents: a bunch of (paper) files, an
               | identikit and a manual on how to take fingerprints.
               | 
               | I think you had the better excuse.
        
               | baz00 wrote:
               | Oh that's terrible but definitely something I'd expect
               | from the police!
        
               | jacquesm wrote:
               | You'd think they have a sanitization process for ex
               | police property but apparently it isn't all that good or
               | maybe just a genuine mistake.
        
             | ourmandave wrote:
             | Sneaker net
             | 
             | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet
        
               | FirmwareBurner wrote:
               | The internet usage that keeps you in shape
        
       | merek wrote:
       | It strikes me that their workspaces looked a mess from all the
       | paper.
       | 
       | Then I look at my workspace, 10s of browser tabs, countless open
       | windows, never enough desktop space.
        
       | fbdab103 wrote:
       | Wayback Machine:
       | https://web.archive.org/web/20230330195500/https://weare.gur...
        
       | zabzonk wrote:
       | serial dec vtxxx and adm terminals - i remember it all so well.
       | and actually, i quite liked it!
        
       | jacquesm wrote:
       | Be sure to check out the drafting tables link at the bottom of
       | the page (or this one, if it times out):
       | 
       | https://web.archive.org/web/20230408160205/https://weare.gur...
        
       | bradfa wrote:
       | No one is smoking?
        
       | TacticalCoder wrote:
       | I was a kid of the eighties (born in the seventies) and my best
       | friend's father was a businessman and he'd constantly be working.
       | So his office was _also_ in his car where he already had.. a
       | cellular phone! (I 'm not even sure the contraption "cellphone"
       | already existed).
       | 
       | So on the weekend when I'd go to the country side with my friend,
       | we'd basically see this (he was always on the phone with either
       | employees or clients so we had to keep quiet in the car) and it
       | felt like being in the future:
       | 
       | https://www.sfchronicle.com/oursf/article/SF-s-first-cellula...
       | 
       | He even had the same haircut.
        
       | Aardwolf wrote:
       | Would love to visit that, but the cigarette smoke everywhere
       | would probably ruin it
        
         | lnsru wrote:
         | I guess that's how my grandfather got lung cancer. Everybody
         | were smoking in the office. He was the single one who never
         | touched a cigarette.
        
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       (page generated 2023-11-26 23:01 UTC)