I was telling a colleague today that I had been working with/for/on/in technology for 22 years. Taking a ride in the way-back machine however, I realized that I worked with technology in my first real professional job — read on..
A friend of the family had gotten me a job at Hall & McChesney in Syracuse New York. H & M was one of those early computer firms who were involved in contracts for computerizing county land documents. So, first there were microfiche, which were a kind of laminate sheet on which a copy of records was kept. The next phase was “punch cards.” There used to be a job called “keypunch operator” – person who produced punch cards, and then the punch cards were fed into a large computer, and voila – hundreds of records could be stored on computer tape. But I digress. My job at M & H was to take printouts of county land deeds and proofread them for accuracy – very, very boring. But I was good at it, so I was deemed to have “potential” – whatever that meant! Iwas invited to work extra hours on Saturdays, where my job was to feed stacks of punch cards into the computers, and then change the tapes when they were full.
In a room like this — very noisy! The tapes probably held 64K of memory – unbelievable in a terabyte-soon-to-be-petabyte world. That was it – not sure I reached my potential, as I only lasted a few months there. But I often wonder – if I had stayed, what road would I have taken?
