We had our monthly "Technology Exchange" meeting at work today (internal lighting talks and short tech talks) and one of the presentations was an interview with a guy who is about to retire after working for our little unit for the last 40 years. When he started, the 6 or 7 programmers had to share 3 terminals (so you wrote you programs on paper before you typed them in). They thought it was great because they didn't have to punch cards anymore. They had a little mini computer in University Hall (across the street from the Berkeley campus) that was the size of a hardware rack where they could test some of their PL/I code -- but had to dial up on a modem to the mainframe down in Westwood (UCLA) to actually run the jobs (he said that computer took up a whole room). The original project for our group was to produce an annual union catalog of the UC libraries holdings on microfiche.

We also had the first network that connected all the campuses, with microwave line of sight to mount zion (UCSF) and satellite dishes. Someone had to write 75k lines of assembly to implement the TCP/IP stack for the mainframe.

Was RG58 the stuff that had the "vampire taps"? We still had some of that when I started at the libraries in 1996.