80s IT

It is now 40 years since I started work in late 1981:

• The first IBM PC had only just been released in the USA.
• The BBC Micro, which sparked massive public UK interest in computing, was still a few months off being released. My Father bought one and my mother spent many hours playing Snapper (Pacman) on it.
• Personal computing devices in businesses was almost unknown.
• UI's were character based, Windows was still many years away.
• Mobile cell phones did not exist.
• Modern Email did not exist outside academia (SMTP was a 1981 invention).
• The world wide web was still many years away.

My first 10 years or so in IT was in development of process control/scientific applications, which I saw as more interesting than business/commercial IT (which my Father worked in).

One of the big differences was that was no specialisation in IT roles within those industries. Job titles just indicated seniority/experience/ability rather than what people actually did. This was quite different to commercial IT departments there was far more of difference between roles, which has only increased over time. In modern terms teams worked in a much more agile manner.

The first company I worked for was less than enjoyable. The first day I was told by another recent starter I would be looking for another job within a month - they were wrong, it was about 2 weeks. The place has been recently started up as an engineering "Software House" (a term much used at that time) and employed people based on work that had never actually materialised. Furthermore, the management had alienated just about all the older staff, who were leaving weekly. The one and only good thing was they had a complete set of RSX-11 operating system manuals, which took up around 1.5m of shelf space, I read the lot cover-to-cover.

My second company was far better and directly or indirectly provided me with work for the next 10 years. The company, ARL (who still exist) made spectrometers used mainly in production facilities, especially in steelworks, plus related software. There was lots of foreign travel. Over the next 10 years I spent over 2 years in the USA, 6 months in Germany and visited other countries including South Africa and Brazil.

The first computer I developed on was a DEC PDP-11/34, running the RSX-11 operating system and with 128k memory and two RL02 (10Mb) discs. It was one of the last machines with a proper console complete with display and buttons. Booting it consisted of entering the address of the boot loader and pressing go. Turning it off was just a case of kill the power. For comparison in 2021 my latest work laptop has over 250,000 times the main memory.

RL02s were single platter removable hard discs, maybe 500mm or so diameter. I once managed to remove one whilst it was spinning, which was a bit if a shock as it tried to fly across the room, but fortuantly managed to get it back in the hole (an interlock should have prevented it coming out). However, the RL02 was particulary well designed and convenient and we were still using them 10 years later.

All the terminals were in the computer room wired directly to the back of the computer. We initially used VT52's which looked rather star-trek like and retro, even for 1981, but they did have a nice mechanical keyboard.