What do you think is a tech skill that you mastered early in your career that's now considered completely obsolete?
I guess for me I used to be really into building computers (e.g. assembling from parts as we all did back in the 1990s, not doing digital circuitry lol), and that really isn't a thing anymore.
Jump to Post— Reverend Jim 6,681Debugging by toggling in hand-assembled code from the front panel.
Jump to Post— Salem 6,025Having to do everything on a single 80x25 monochrome terminal. Everything needed lots of ctrl-alt-shift wizardry to get anything done.
Oh and mastering Microsoft FrontPage. :)
Debugging by toggling in hand-assembled code from the front panel.
Writin .bat files in DOS and long prompts in debug.
For the user: Reading hardware and software manuals (does anything come with a printed manual these days?). Mastering motherboard pin jumpers. Low-level formatting disks and understanding tracks and sectors (FDisk anyone?). BIOS anything. Expanded and Extended memory configuration. Terminate and Stay Resident programs. Config.sys and Autoexec.bat. Basically anything DOS, although I find DOS knowledge still comes in handy in a Windows Command box. Probably something never experienced by Apple users?
Reading hardware and software manuals
Fer sher. I can handle printed manuals (I love the feel), and PDF (easier searching), but I hate hate hate HTML based documentation where every page has 50 links to other sections contaiang more links. I am accustomed to reading manuals (virtual) cover to (virtual) cover. The trouble with HTML manuals is you have no way of knowing if you have read everything, and it's too easy to get multiple layers down in links and not be able to get back out.
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