I have been working in Information Technology (IT for fans of the IT Crowd) for a very long time, specifically 1978, when I was 19. So I've seen quite a bit. It's now 2014 so it's been roughly 36 years.
I had been a night watchman at Burndy in Norwalk, CT in their computer room which housed a Sperry Univac system. There were offices in the computer room, not an unusual situation in 1976. So I camped out in one of the offices for my shift, with nothing else to do I began reading manuals. As it turned out, this was the most auspicious thing I could do.
When my time at Burndy came to an end I was transferred to being a night watchman at Waldenbooks on Ludlow St. in Stamford CT. The Ludlow st. facility also housed a computer room (of sorts). It was a remote job entry system connected to an IBM Mainframe in California at the parent corporation. Carter Hawley Hale.
I wasn't in the computer room but I established a friendship with the 2nd shift computer operations staff. Once they realized I was familiar with many of the concepts involved in their operation, including real and virtual memory, disk storage, tape handling, batch processing ... etc. They enlisted me to do most of the scut work, tape backups, job entry. About the only thing I wasn't doing was filling out logs and incident reports :).
Fast forward a year, I've given up on community college and looking for work. By chance I run into the shift supervisor from the Waldenbooks computer room it had been almost a year since I was rotated off the Waldenbooks account. He asks what I'm up to, I explain that I'd quit college and looking for work. He smiled and informed me they had just moved into a brand new facility in North Stanford (Ludlow St. was a bit of a hole). With a new computer room housing a brand new IBM 370/138 as the Remote Job Entry Station. In other words a real Mainframe to submit jobs to a much bigger Mainframe. The arrangement seemed kind of silly and it was. But I was to be an Entry Level computer operator, such discussions were way above my Pay Grade :). Which was now significantly higher than it was before... To be continued.
