And here's another bit of a sidebar about what technologies I used in my Work History. As stated, I’m hoping that this personal history will shed some light on how I picked up the talents and skills I did, which is a bit of a mystery to me. Maybe a review of the technologies involved will help.
In my early jobs we used mechanical or electric cash registers and adding machines, string tying machines, manual and electric typewriters, shovels and hammers and knives and stuff, big ledgers, telephones, and the U.S. Mail. In college there was no advanced technology used by the students; we used pen/pencil and lots of notebooks, wrote term papers longhand, went to the library to use the card catalog, and read books or sometimes newspaper archives on microfiche. We’d listen to the professors lecture (sometimes smoking cigarettes or pipes in class, both us and them) and a few of them, art history teachers particularly, would use overhead or slide projectors. Class handouts were produced by mimeograph machines. I and a few friends did an arts letter for a while, which I typed onto a single page with a manual typewriter, and would take into Harvard Square to get Xeroxed. I used a huge Xerox machine when I worked for the government, which we’d often have to do surgery on to remove paper jams.
When I was a cab driver our big tool was Checker Cabs, big cars with internal combustion engines that our mechanics kept running all day and had to be retired after four years or so. Each cab had a Motorola short-wave radio with a hand-held mike. The dispatchers would broadcast to the whole fleet (e.g., “Top at 7?”). We could respond directly to the dispatcher, starting each message with our cab number to bid on fares. My friends and I would exchange numbers each morning (e.g., “I’m driving 209 today”) so we could keep track of each other and try to meet up.
At Tufts and in graduate school I was introduced to dumb terminals, which were like typewriters but a bit smarter. The terminals in Wessell communicated with the mainframe at OCLC in Ohio over phone lines. In graduate school I took a course in “online searching,” which was done by one student at a time using a dedicated keyboard/display that communicated over phone lines with one of the few academic databases available at the time. In both cases we’d have to configure the router correctly and reboot it all the time. For one of the last projects I worked on at Tufts, we used Apple IIs to catalog books into our new online database (“TULIPS”) and produce barcode labels for them.
As mentioned, working at Inforonics (“the marriage of electronics and information” was an early marketing slogan) starting in 1987 was moving into the space age for me. We used dumb terminals networked to a mainframe at the Boston Public Library and then moved to terminals networked to one computer with a 286 chip. And at Geac we used Apples to do word processing, but the end result was printing everything out and compiling our bid documents (with illustrations) into fancy loose-leaf notebooks which we shipped to our potential customers.
A huge change in how our offices operated came about slowly. At Inforonics back in the late 80s we still communicated with each other over telephone. You kept a list of phone extensions next to the most important bit of technology on your desk, the phone, and called up and down the corridor, even to the office right next door, when you needed to collaborate. And when the phone rang you answered it. If you knew the right incantations, you could even set up our phones to run conference calls, though this feature was error-prone and wasn’t used much. Communication with clients was done by calling them up, writing them a memo and mailing it, or doing a business trip. Then in the early 90s we started running an email server on our 286. I was assigned the username “jbx” since I didn’t have a middle initial, and gradually most of the people in the office began to use email rather than the phone, though external communication was still old school.
When I started at SilverPlatter, many of our customers would still buy CD towers from us to run our databases, but over the course of my 4 years there almost all switched to Windows or Apple workstations and would load CDs we’d ship them. Some customers were even on our web product by the time I left in 1998. As far as what was on our desktops, a huge jump occurred just as I started there in 1994 with the introduction of Windows 3.1, which was the first GUI OS that really did it successfully. We all had PCs running the latest Windows operating system when I finished.
But another revolution had started. We still used email constantly, but we were all signing up on AOL Instant Messenger and using that more and more for work communication. Strange because most people used the same account for both personal and business stuff, and sometimes awkward overlaps would occur. But everyone found it much easier, less formal, and cooler than email or the phone.
Back at Inforonics, we all had Windows desktops, but would spend most of the day on UNIX terminal emulator programs, such as Putty. Some used newer editors, but many of us still used the old VI program. We were writing programs in our proprietary Blue Sky language (and using Blue Sky databases), in UNIX shell scripts, and most of our stuff was written in Perl. Over at Prospero we were also using the most current Windows desktops. We used editors like HomeSite (an essential tool) and Notepad++ to edit our HTML templates, and our databases were SQL Server. As mentioned, the huge thing at Prospero was the use of our own forum software for communication and as an archive of technical knowledge. On email I had started as “jbx” but when I moved to Prospero my user name became “jbxpro,” which I still use.
IM was ubiquitous when I started at Mzinga, and we all still had AOL accounts. But enterprises were adopting the new tools by then, and when I started at OneSource we were beginning to use real collaboration software. One Source had grown out of Lotus and we were stuck on their venerable 1-2-3 product for email and source control. But soon we shifted to Microsoft Outlook for email. Again, we all had Windows desktops there and kept our huge databases in SQL Server. We also had some LINUX boxes, because we had a department that used LINUX for bespoke professional services jobs, and also sometimes when ingesting content from vendors that ran on UNIX. I had an account on a LINUX box and used Putty and SCP to do some content manipulation before I became really comfortable with SQL Server Management Studio.
Another big change happened in the OneSource/Avention years. Many people had used things like pagers and what came to be called PDAs (such as the PalmPilot), to be connected when remote. But gearmakers kept making laptops lighter and with bigger screens, and soon everyone was ditching their big desktops and the pagers/PDAs on their belts and hauling their laptops around everywhere with them. People who didn’t really need computing power, that is! Those of us who used huge databases had to keep our desktops, but we were also freed up by the ability to VPN into the office and to different servers. That meant that when there was a bad Winter storm or I was feeling a bit sick, I could work from home … all I had to do was leave my desktop powered up and I could use Virtual Private Network software to connect to it securely. Wait a minute, was this good or bad? Pretty much “good” I guess, but this development meant that people were expected to work from home, instead of just when they were in the office. And many people did, checking email when on vacation and never being off the work grid.
It didn’t take long before enterprises went all-in on this and started pushing devices on their employees to help them stay connected 24x7, and started installing hugely complex collaboration programs on all of the devices. Soon, people were joining in on sales calls from the chairlift on their European vacation or attending meetings while stuck in traffic on the George Washington Bridge. Not me! But I loved the mature versions of Microsoft Teams in my last few years of work. It was routine to be in a video meeting with people all over the globe and to be talking with my boss on a side-chat during the meeting (saying things like, “He didn’t fucking say that, did he?? OMG, what a tool!”) and checking the status of lunch plans in another chat. And to be able to organize and hold a meeting with remote colleagues immediately instead of having to wait for an empty conference room or for everyone to check their email was huge.
By the time we moved to Waltham I’d junked my desktop too and was just on a fine laptop running the latest Windows. We were expected to carry our laptops home with us in case we needed to work from there, and I had no problem with this. And when I needed computing power I could RDP into one of our servers that was located … in the cloud. The cloud was ubiquitous by then, we had data centers here and there and it was hard to keep straight what physical machine was actually located where, which made a difference when running cross-server SQL queries. Early on, laptops were not able to quickly (or successfully) switch between hardware setups, but my latest couple were great about portability. My laptop could live on my desk at work hooked up to a docking station that ran two large monitors, my VOIP phone, and input devices, then I could unplug from the monitor and go join a meeting and have the same windows open up successfully on the smaller screen, then take it back to my desk and plug it back in and the windows would stay where they were supposed to, and then I could take it home and switch to the monitors there with no problem. A miracle!
The COVID-19 pandemic came along in March 2020, and collaboration software was even more important, and it was layered with a new level of informality. There was no expectation that people had to be wearing suits, sitting up at a conference table, and paying attention. I was in many high-level meetings where someone was interrupted by their toddler, their dog, the washing-machine repairman, the toilet flushing or the dishwasher making strange sounds. And no one held it against them, we were all in the same boat and trying to keep it afloat.
Wow, that’s a huge span of technology just in my working lifetime. But I’m not going to miss not being around for the next developments! Many people (like me) kept their cameras off while in online meetings and eventually (like me) acquiesced and turned the camera on. It *does* make a difference to see the people you’re talking with. I could already sense the next step to collaboration software though, that people expected a new level of transparency, demanding that other people on their team post their notes and preliminary findings. Geez, talk about taking something meant to save time and fucking it up with paranoia! Oh well, say hi for me at your next video call.
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