The Secret of Every IT Pro
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@Carnival-Boy honestly it was all books and troubleshooting. I've never called a vendor for support to this day
except some tiny vendors like three person companies where we were using custom software.When I started posting on Spiceworks was the first that I ever heard that you could even do that. That everyone was figuring things out for themselves blew my mind. I literally had no idea.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
How did you cope with support before the internet? I remember phoning Microsoft a few times, but generally I can't really remember what I did. I'm sure that problems that take ten minutes to solve now could take a whole day back then.
Trial and error. I was fixing computer issues before I had Internet access.
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@alexntg and you had to keep a lot of stuff in your head; hardware specs, configurations, etc.
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PCs were simpler when I started out <goes misty eyed with the memory>. I was supporting Displaywrite and Lotus 1-2-3 on IBM Model 55s running MS-DOS. There wasn't much that could go wrong. Config.sys was pretty simple. You could tinker about with Files and Buffers settings and that was about it as far as I can recall.....
On the other hand, I remember trying to figure out OS/2 something of a challenge.
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Yup. That and I had to read books to figure it out before I had high speed internet or Google.
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There is a reason why the MCSE was such a big deal.
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Hmmn, this makes me think of the current Uber battle in London. Black cabs in London have to pass "The Knowledge", one of the toughest tests in the world apparently, to prove they know London's streets inside and out. Now Uber have come along and anyone can be a taxi driver with Google Maps.
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There was IT before the Internet?
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@StrongBad said:
There was IT before the Internet?
Certainly. The first LANs I worked with had no Internet connectivity.
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@StrongBad there were IT shops without Internet access. But the IT profession is post 1970. And since The Internet came from the late 1960s, technically there was no IT without the Internet. But there might as well have been no Internet before 1992 or so.
