Originally Posted by
Thaimato
Just for a change, I'm in agreement with Dr. A. Certainly don't count myself as anything near to a geek, even after working 27 years with computers, before - err - retiring. As Dr. A. points out, back then mainframes (as they were often called) were enormous room-sized buggers that took hours to compute anything useful. Half the time they didn't work and there were techie guys crawling all over the thing, trying to fix summat or other.
And for the poster that reckons IT people have cushy jobs - that may well be the case now (I have really no idea), but it certainly wasn't in days of yore, where often a 16-hour day was often called for and expected - and with unpaid overtime, too. However, the salary was above normal, granted, with a few other benefits. The most I ever worked in one stretch was 38 hours - must've got through around 100 gallons of coffee in that time.