Shoot! I dropped my deck of punch cards!

If you pay attention, you’ll notice that geeks tend to communicate their seniority and experience to each other by listing the archaic technologies of their youth. “I used to type in my program into the PDP-8 with those sixteen mechanical switches.” “I remember when I dropped my deck of cards on the computer room floor.” (That’s the funniest one, because although the speaker thinks that punch cards are the mark of antiquity, it’s really the existence of a computer room.)  I won’t bore you with mine… alright, if you insist: Remember when you had to get the tone right on the tape recorder to  save your program? My bet is that although the stories will change as time goes on, they will still be told.

Did you ever wonder what story the twenty one year old phone engineer of today will tell when he’s nearing retirement? Here’s my best guesses:

1) “When I was a kid, we actually had dedicated hardware for the phone system. It was a box. It wasn’t in the network; it was something you could point to and touch! These guys would show up at your office and install it.”
2) “Everybody had the (basically) same setup. Big companies like Nortel and Avaya would design them, and then everybody would get it. So, check this: it would have 500 features, but you would only use a dozen or so. No, nobody could actually test all the feature interactions.”

3) “Do you remember when phone applications were proprietary? Every different big company had their own version of the same thing, but they were all slightly different, so you couldn’t learn just one. There were like a couple of dozen vendors of the very same thing.”

4) “Seriously, we had these phones on the wall with no screens, no text, no applications. And they were attached! You couldn’t take them out of your house! And the crazy thing was that cell phones didn’t work well in the house, so you almost had to use them.”"

5) “They had these big poles made out of wood, and they strung the phone wires between them and when a storm came, you lost service when the wires snapped. And boy, were they ugly!”

6) “No really, you used to pay for voice calls – by the minute! Its how phone companies (yes, they had companies that only carried phone calls) would make their money. And they had these minute plans where you had to guess at how many you would use, then if you made more – they charge you double – and if you didn’t use all of them… too bad.”

7) “Yes, calling from Boston to Barcelona cost more than calling from Boston to New York. No one ever really understood why. And we had these numbers for each phone. You wouldn’t call me, you’d call this number attached to the phone. And when you got a different phone, you had to call a different number. Phones didn’t know who was using them. Seriously.”

8 ) “They used to call it texting. They limited them to something like 150 characters, no graphics, and only mobile phones could send and receive them. I shit you not.”

9) “Do you remember Twitter? These celebrities would compete to see how many followers they had, but of course, they wouldn’t follow you back. It was like you had nothing that they wanted except for your attention, so they could sell you more stuff”

10) “Yeah – you couldn’t really add voice or texting to your program. It was a big deal with crazy, arcane technologies. No, really, phones had their own protocols. Nuts, huh?”