Young People – are you familar with the term "Photocopier".

I sent a telex once.
we weren’t allowed to touch the telex, we had to write the note on a piece of paper and one of the typing pool would do it….

You’re right

When I said ‘I sent a telex once’, what I actually did was hand it to a female member of staff (because back then, only ladies did ‘typing’, who approved it and sat at the massive thing in its own room. Some time later I was given a bit of typed paper with lots of numbers on, which proved it had been sent.

I still have a complete copy of my PhD thesis text on a 3.5″ floppy.

In my experience most floppy disks seemed to die in the 20 minutes between saving your precious work on them and getting to the department printer, I wonder if you actually still do…

(Have you still got anything to read said disk on?)

Ah Banda. Purple hands.
Of course kids know what a photo copier is. You send their tiny little hands in to sort out paper jams. And the little so and so’s know full well that b&w is cheapest but still do it all in red.

I recently explained the concept of film cameras to my 11 and 9 year old. You could see them trying to judge if I was on a wind up or not.

Same with manual window wipers when I bought a poverty spec ford to rattle muddy bikes around in. They wouldn’t actually beleive me until they tried it themselves.

See also: ash trays on desks…I think in a office of 8 of us, 6 of them smoked…grim

I remember being in the drawing office at ICI in the late 80’s (oh… the glamour!). Everyone in there smoked like chimneys (including me). There are massive Chinese coal fired power stations that produce less fumes than that office. You could barely see across the room! Absolutely minging!

I remember spending a lot of time in the dark room, processing film, and printing stuff in baths of chemicals too. Try explaining that process to someone who’s only ever known digital photography, Snapchat and Instagram.

Banknotes are encoded with a pattern of dots which the copier will recognise and tell you you’re going to jail.

Not the one next to me….yes I was sucker enough to go and try it.

In my experience most floppy disks seemed to die in the 20 minutes between saving your precious work on them and getting to the department printer, I wonder if you actually still do…

I remember the epic unreliability of these:

My first sighting of a 3.5″ floppy was accompanied by wonderment at such strange magic.

Some 15 years ago or so I was doing some software training. It was a mixed bunch but all were supposedly “IT literate” since they were being upgraded from our DOS-based software to our Windows version.

The thing is, one or two of the more “senior” ones present were quite happy working in DOS on their dumb terminals, but had never seen a mouse. One of them picked the mouse up – PS/2 lead attached to the back of the PC – and started talking into it thinking it was…well, I’m not sure what she was thinking, but she was probably ahead of her time 😆

^ 😆

That explains it all 🙂

In ’97 I started at secondary school and also moved house.

I remember thinking that the new school was so much better than the one I was going to go to because we got a whole 4MB of hard drive space on the server instead of having to buy a 3.5″ disk, in a school of about 800 that meant they must have a 4GB server, COOL!

IT GCSE was a joke, the ‘practical’ element was stuff like typing in word, and not pressing enter at the end of each line, did they think we used typewriters at home or something?

And labeling the bits of a picture of a PC with terms like VDU. Who uses the term VDU rather than monitor, or screen, or if you really like TLAs DSE?

I used to work in a lab and someone bought a ancient bit of analytical kit from the early 90’s that used some horrendous cable (it was even bigger than serial) and only ran with DOS. Half a day rummaging in the store room of stuff that really should have been re-cycled but had been kept ‘just in case’ I emerged with a CRT monitor and a PC of the correct vintage. Then spent the rest of the day re-learning DOS. The people even more junior than me (so born around ’90) thought it was some kind of coding magic that I could type in a line of text and things just happened!

I like the fact that we’re all being left behind by the new generation. Happens a lot here in the Big House, I find it satisfying that they all look so young and full of energy. They all just seem to get on with it where as I when IIRC was that young I stumbled and fell on my arse in sight of the Boss so many times. Today, the kids just look on in bemusement and come over and help when citrix crashes for the 1000th time.

Gotta love youth.

IT GCSE was a joke

I was class of ’88 so the first year to have the option of “Computers” at GCSE. I was torn over doing that or Electronics (they were in the same option group, who ever would want to do both?). I looked at the sylab- silub- silly bus and realised that a) I knew everything contained within it and b) the teacher didn’t. Doesn’t sound like it’s changed much in the next decade from what you describe.

Not all youngsters are great with IT. Back in 2000 I sat next to a trainee accountant as couldn’t find a spare desk. I watched her enter a list of numbers into Excel then enter them into a calculator and then putting the total into the spreadsheet. I was amazed that no-one had picked up on this before as she’d been there for quite a while. Anyway, I showed her what to do to get the total but she still insisted on checking with her calculator.

I had to explain this to a 22yo MSc graduate yesterday.

I felt really old. He dis find the concept quite fascinating and quite cleverly pointed out that it was an early form of social media.

Oh Citrix, how I despise thee.

Do you also have a SWR meter and a Firestik?

“One Four for a copy!” 😀

I watched her enter a list of numbers into Excel then enter them into a calculator and then putting the total into the spreadsheet.

When I first started in a Quantity Surveying office, we had a comp. Her name was Kathy, and all day she would punch numbers into the comp machine (from our dims or dimensions measured from plans with an actual scale rule no less!) and churn out long shopping-lists of totals.

A couple of years later we got a computer, and she got redundancy 🙁

Actually back to the OP, I’m fairly sure most of the older kids at our local primary know how to use the multi-function device to copy something. It’s certainly not an uncommon thing to do with it, and the kids often get tasked with such jobs.

I wouldn’t print or copy anything on a colour MFD like money etc as it can be traced back to the machine besides they have anti counterfeit measures which stop money from being outputed.

it can be traced back to the machine

Got any further reading for that, I’ve not come across it?

You techno geeks. I started teaching with two of these in my lab… 😆

It’s been on digital copiers since they came out, more info here

HOWTO read the secret forensic dots in your laser-printer output

If you use a linen tester (magnifying glass) you can see it or scan the output and convert yellow to black. Yellow is the hardest colour for human eyes to see so its quite hard to see.

Happy days.
Going into Laskeys and playing on one of the new computers.
10 Print “Tits”
20 GOTO 10

RUN

It’s been on digital copiers since they came out, more info here

Yeah, I knew about the dots on the notes, it was the ‘tracing back’ I was asking about.

My kids didn’t believe me when I told them about black boards.

Back in the 90’s I was night auditor at a large hotel and had to ‘back up’the days trading onto those large floppy disks it took 7 discs on as quiet day. There were also huge proprietary cartridges about the size of a box of cornflakes x 4 to be changed at various points during the night to save all the reservations data. So when we were getting a new system and the sales guy says no discs and no cartridges we didn’t believe him.

Cougar there arnt any dots on the notes that I know of the dots are on the outputs of the mfd read the link I provided or Google it and all the info is there

Cougar there arnt any dots on the notes that I know of

There are dots on all UK banks notes called the EURion Constellation.

Had to show a degree mech eng how to use a set square. Was a little surprised to learn that know one learns how to draw with a pencil anymore, it explained a lot. When I suggest they go to site and measure up a bit of kit they youngster s..t themselves and the gimmers ( like me) are out the door and on their way.

Kids are so bloody clever at stuff these days but they never fail to impress on how lost they be be without some sort of smart device. No wonder plumbers are so sort after. Now who nicked me slide rule?

Set square man you know who are if you read this!

I went into the workshop in one of the sites I worked on, there was a room that would have seated 40 or 50 with a pile of drawing boards all dumped gathering dust and cobwebs, replaced by 4 guys on autocad.

and this tech advancement – not only does it tell you the real frequency rather than rolling the dial but it turns over your tape for you – without exploding or breaking. That it TARDIS Technology that!

😀

My handle(on older family friends radio) was Oli the owl… 8)

yep learnt to program with punch cards

late 70’s worked at British Steel in research and we were very excited to get an early portable computer to take out into the plant to collect data – was the size of a washing machine and we had a cortina estate to take it about in

oh and we had tea breaks with a tea lady and trolley

I was class of ’88 so the first year to have the option of “Computers” at GCSE. I was torn over doing that or Electronics (they were in the same option group, who ever would want to do both?). I looked at the sylab- silub- silly bus and realised that a) I knew everything contained within it and b) the teacher didn’t. Doesn’t sound like it’s changed much in the next decade from what you describe.

Moving forward a few years (early 90’s), our school was dead posh and used Apple Mac – these ones:

Had about an 8″ screen so to see anything you had to enlarge the document or image and move that around the screen to see the bit you were working on.
And yes, all the IT teachers knew about a tenth of what the kids knew…

You were lucky, in my day I had to do an A Level on one of these;

or, if you were one of the clever ones and allowed access to the mainframe at Sussex Uni via a 300 baud modem you got to use the teletype:

What usually happened was you filled in a load of coding forms;

Sent them off to be keyed in and a week or two later at some prearranged time the teletype would spew out whatever the results of the code were and you’d then pore over the coding forms to work out what went wrong…

It were proper graft in them days, being a programmer.

We had a Teletype at college, just like that one. Never used it, but saw it in use sometimes after hours by, presumably, someone on a night course (because being spods we used to spend evenings in the college computer room getting up to mischief “working”).

We used to use it to get free phone calls. It had an old-style BT phone attached to it (possibly with an acoustic coupler, I don’t remember exactly). The phone didn’t have a dial on it, the front was just blank where the dial should be. What it did have, however, was a cradle and pulse dialling. So you could take it off-hook and hammer out the numbers morse-code style on the cradle. Pheer our l33t skilz.

So here is the computer and plotter I used in my first job. The part you can’t see is the mighty 10Mb washing machine sized drive under the desk. It ran UNIX of course. Have we had a unixtrackworld thread yet?

Work experience at school I went to a local council IT place for a week and spent much of that time doing punch cards. I bet they’re still using them 😀

Also in the process of producing these cards I remember you had to go to a terminal and type in plain hex codes which got written to an 8″ floppy and that went in another machine which produced the cards, then stick the cards in a mainframe card hopper. Or something like that.

richmars – Member
Happy days.
Going into Laskeys and playing on one of the new computers.
10 Print “Tits”
20 GOTO 10

RUN

Most my time spent in WHSmiths doing this (maybe with something more rude).

Though came unstuck with the Jupiter Ace which used Forth instead of BASIC.

I spent a summer student placement writing Forth code at BT’s Martlesham Heath labs many moons ago…

What it did have, however, was a cradle and pulse dialling. So you could take it off-hook and hammer out the numbers morse-code style on the cradle. Pheer our l33t skilz.

😆

Though came unstuck with the Jupiter Ace which used Forth instead of BASIC.

“tits” print
10 goto

(make a good Forth programmer Yoda would)

[4 Yorkshiremen] Was reminiscing in the pub the other night about a holiday I booked on Ceefax. As is typical with me, I was looking for a ‘bargain’ and I spotted a deal but the page changed before I managed to get the phone number and I had to wait about 20 minutes or so for Ceefax to page through the other 76 pages for that “travel agents” (WTF is a “Travel Agent”!!) page to come back on screen [/4 Yorkshiremen]