Re: Good Old (Tech) Days....WAS "Can this career be saved?"

[Chantel Brathwaite <brathwaitec -at- castupgrade -dot- com>]

This thread is really bringing back memories.  I remember working on my 
school newspaper and having to cut and paste sections to layout the 
newspaper back in the late 80s.

My first real job was as a computer operator in 1988.  My days consisted 
of mounting and remounting mag tapes, cleaning tape drives, retrieving 
tapes from the automatic tape library that didn't quite make it onto the 
metal arm, and learning JCL to control IBM mainframes.  I was bored 
stiff.  I transferred to an office doing administrative work (the pay 
was better and I didn't have to work swing shifts), but the work load 
was light and advancement was extremely limited.  So, I ended up 
spending most of my time teaching myself the Wang wordprocessor (anyone 
else remember that?), Framemaker (which was available on the Sun 3 and 
Sun 4 machines - before the Sparc Stations), reading man pages and 
experimenting with unix commands, vi, emacs, and how to program in basic 
(goto anyone?) - which was the only compiler I had access to at the 
time.  I used Officewriter for word processing.  I learned Wordperfect 
too and tried to get my hands on a copy of Harvard Graphics, but ended 
up really concentrating on Interleaf and Framemaker.  I had no idea that 
I'd ever be a technical writer - I didn't even know what a technical 
writer was.  But, when I graduated from undergrad, those skills really 
helped me to land my first and second tech writing gigs.


On 6/7/2011 10:29 PM, beelia wrote: