I'm surprised, given where you live Alistair, that you think coopers are scarce - still very much in demand for wine farms (in addition to distilleries but not just of the hipster kind). Can't age wine, brandy, or the water of life in plastic or stainless! 😂
Reading about hot-metal printing plates brought back memories as a boy when visiting the printers where my dad worked. There were hot bubbling cauldrons of molten lead, noisy hot machines where the guys typed out the text that was going to be printed which produced heaps of lead formed letters.
My dads job was to take these and "typeset" them into the page that was going to be printed and check that there were no mistakes, quite a skilled job then when the typeface facing you was the mirror image.
Then they would mount a stack up, do a run of those pages, then melt them down and do the next batch of pages.
This would be the late 1960's, a different world then.
After Uni, I started work at a company which had a Telex Room run by three ladies of impressive proportions, and a manned (by ladies) switchboard for the internal/external telephone system.
You entered the typing pool office with trepidation; some people retrieving their transcripts were never the same again. And we had office and department secretaries who were selected solely on ability or do I mean sociability?
Potentially traumatising but we learned hands-on how to get the best from these pools of talent and they were very good at showing the correct form (this might be losing something in translation). This direct interaction could never happen on bloody Zoom, Skype or Teams.
Now, productivity is everything. Then, being productive could have life-changing consequences.
Telex. Fax. Postroom. Internal phones. Typists. Clerks. Shorthand. Certified Copy. Like coopers, slide rules and calculators, all gone.
This could end up being a 4 Yorkshiremen set of comments,
But when I started out working in IT (I had already done 8 years as an autocad draughtsman) we had a token ring network full of cau and lam, with bridges (not switches).
Dial up modems youngsters these days can’t imagine a 56k modem, or using E1 links and a site to site link of 256k.
Great column Alistair. As someone mentioned, this could easily become a 4 Yorkshire men set of comments but, hey.. When you've been in computing since 1976 like me... I am actually looking after enterprise software that was written 30 years ago in the 1990's. Its still central to the organisation. Fortunately the development tool (PowerBuilder), after a hiccup, is now keeping up with the technology but people today expect an application to be a lot more intuitive.
If you're ever in Cambridge, checkout the Centre for Computing History at https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/. Sirius and Apple II from when I started out up the virtual chimney of the world of work etc.
I'm surprised, given where you live Alistair, that you think coopers are scarce - still very much in demand for wine farms (in addition to distilleries but not just of the hipster kind). Can't age wine, brandy, or the water of life in plastic or stainless! 😂
I had to explain to the youngest what a 386 based computer was...
Reading about hot-metal printing plates brought back memories as a boy when visiting the printers where my dad worked. There were hot bubbling cauldrons of molten lead, noisy hot machines where the guys typed out the text that was going to be printed which produced heaps of lead formed letters.
My dads job was to take these and "typeset" them into the page that was going to be printed and check that there were no mistakes, quite a skilled job then when the typeface facing you was the mirror image.
Then they would mount a stack up, do a run of those pages, then melt them down and do the next batch of pages.
This would be the late 1960's, a different world then.
I always thought "lengthsman" sounded like an interesting occupation.
After Uni, I started work at a company which had a Telex Room run by three ladies of impressive proportions, and a manned (by ladies) switchboard for the internal/external telephone system.
You entered the typing pool office with trepidation; some people retrieving their transcripts were never the same again. And we had office and department secretaries who were selected solely on ability or do I mean sociability?
Potentially traumatising but we learned hands-on how to get the best from these pools of talent and they were very good at showing the correct form (this might be losing something in translation). This direct interaction could never happen on bloody Zoom, Skype or Teams.
Now, productivity is everything. Then, being productive could have life-changing consequences.
Telex. Fax. Postroom. Internal phones. Typists. Clerks. Shorthand. Certified Copy. Like coopers, slide rules and calculators, all gone.
This could end up being a 4 Yorkshiremen set of comments,
But when I started out working in IT (I had already done 8 years as an autocad draughtsman) we had a token ring network full of cau and lam, with bridges (not switches).
Dial up modems youngsters these days can’t imagine a 56k modem, or using E1 links and a site to site link of 256k.
Great column Alistair. As someone mentioned, this could easily become a 4 Yorkshire men set of comments but, hey.. When you've been in computing since 1976 like me... I am actually looking after enterprise software that was written 30 years ago in the 1990's. Its still central to the organisation. Fortunately the development tool (PowerBuilder), after a hiccup, is now keeping up with the technology but people today expect an application to be a lot more intuitive.
If you're ever in Cambridge, checkout the Centre for Computing History at https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/. Sirius and Apple II from when I started out up the virtual chimney of the world of work etc.