Reading an old IT manual from 1995 made me feel like a dinosaur

I was cleaning out a storage closet last week and found a network setup guide from Compaq. It had step-by-step instructions for configuring token ring adapters and terminating coax cables with BNC connectors. I had to stop and think about how many hours I spent crimping those damn cables back in the day. A junior tech walked by and asked what a BNC connector was. Kinda hit me how much the job has shifted from physical hardware to software and cloud stuff. Anyone else feel like half your old skills are just trivia now?

2 comments

2 Comments

luna5197d ago

Stood there for a solid minute trying to explain a BNC connector to someone who's never seen a coax cable in their life. Thats the thing about this industry, the stuff you spent years getting good at just evaporates. One day you're the person everyone calls to fix a token ring network, the next day its all VLANs and cloud configs that dont even have a physical port to touch. Its like the whole job keeps moving and you either keep up or get left behind with a drawer full of adapters nobody needs anymore.

luna5197d ago

Hold up, I gotta disagree a little. Those old skills aren't trivia, they're the foundation that made us good at the new stuff. Knowing how to terminate a coax cable taught me why signal loss matters in a network, which is still a thing with fiber runs. Understanding token ring gave me a deeper grasp of collision domains and network topology that VLANs just abstract away. The physical layer never really disappears, it just gets smaller and faster. The junior techs who never had to crimp anything are the ones who struggle when a physical switch port acts weird or a cable run goes bad. Those old skills are still useful, they just get used different now.