What did people do in 1985?

[The Brain]

Does anyone remember the card catalogs at the libraries?

Fondly.

[crazy canuck]

I believe it's a fair representation of the average office smoke break.

Going commando was generally frowned upon back in the day - and wearing jeans.

[Razgovory]

Does anyone remember the card catalogs at the libraries?

I do.  When I was middle school they taught how to use the card catalogues and the periodicals and all that stuff.  When I went to college the school used an entirely different system and I couldn't find anything.  I ended just picking up books at random.

"It's not a bad paper, but it's about French fables.  This is a biology class and you were suppose to write about watersheds."

[crazy canuck]

What system did your college use?

[PDH]

The Don't-he Decibel system.

[crazy canuck]

 

[Jacob]

Really don't think famous popstars where at average smoke breaks in 1985

You'd be surprised!

[Tonitrus]

I was 9 years old, playing pirated Apple II games like Kareteka, the original Castle Wolfenstein, Taipan!, The Ancient Art of War, the early games in the Ultima series, and that Apple II 4X classic, Lordlings of Yore.

[Josephus]

Does anyone remember the card catalogs at the libraries?

Yes!

I havent' been to a library since my university days in the late 80s. If I were to go to one now to do research I'd be lost. No card catalogues? No microfiche?

[Grey Fox]

Does anyone remember the card catalogs at the libraries?

Yes!

I havent' been to a library since my university days in the late 80s. If I were to go to one now to do research I'd be lost. No card catalogues? No microfiche?

You can probably already look up the book on your local library website and reserve it right now.

[Savonarola]

Getting precise coordinates is an important part of the job as a radio engineer.  We use this information to model our radio coverage.  When I started working as an engineer (1994) our office had a series of cabinets which held USGS 7.5 minute maps.  You'd have to find the correct map, put a dot on the map at the location you were trying to get coordinates of, get the nearest 30 second markings, draw a trapezoid from them and decline your location.  Then you'd have to count contour lines to get your height (that task would have been much easier in Florida than it was in Michigan.)  Today you can do all that in about 5 seconds on Google Earth.

(GIS and ARC did exist at the time, but it was expensive and you almost needed a college degree in GIS to use it.)

At the time radio propagation software (which predicts radio coverage) was in its infancy, but it existed.  About ten years before that you would have had to draw your coverage contours by hand using some crude formulas.

When I first started our network was in Detroit, but the central switch was located in Chicago.  Each cell site has its own database of parameters in the switch which impact how the site behaves and they can be adjusted to improve performance.  At the time the switch manager in Chicago didn't trust us with even reader-only access to the switch; so, every day, his team would print out all the data from every site (about 100 sites, 3 pages of data) and FedEx them to us.

[KRonn]

1985 - I was working in IT, still new and learning, programming and operations. Few personal computers as I recall. My cousins had a computer store back then, before computers were sold by the big box stores. I remember the internet was a new and strange thing, dial-up modems, very archaic compared to today. Now I can't imagine a world without the convenience of the internet. Newspapers and news magazines of all kinds were commonplace. I was hunting with friends and family in those years, in Canada and all over New England.