10 IT Job Titles We Miss
IT veterans pick their favorite -- largely obsolete -- job titles of yesteryear. Join us on a 20-year-stroll down memory lane.
Revel in IT nostalgia
Back in the heady days of 1995, InformationWeek ran a story with the headline "Surfing The Net For Email."
The piece begins: "Want to check your electronic mail from the road? Just get to the nearest PC and surf the Internet. Lotus Development has come up with a way for users of its cc:Mail system to access their corporate network-based mail via the World Wide Web."
(Let's pause for a moment to let younger readers stop laughing.)
Later in the story, a Motorola manager says of Lotus's foray into web-based email: "This provides us with an excellent way to get access to e-mail while on the road. We won't have to carry a portable and we can essentially walk up to anybody's machine and access mail back at the home office."
Such were the beginnings of the 24/7 email access that the corporate world now takes for granted (and sometimes curses). It also marked an ending. cc:Mail Administrators soon became an endangered IT species. You won't find any help wanted ads for cc:Mail Administrators today, though you're liable to bump into a few technology vets who once held that job.
"I used to have that title," says IT pro Bob Beatty. "Wow -- bringing up some old memories."
The tech world loves its buzzwords, the trendy terminology of today and tomorrow. We thought it would be more fun, however, to tune up the time machine and remind ourselves of the IT job titles and technologies that were popular 20 years ago -- but that have since fallen out of favor or disappeared altogether. It's an inexact timeline that approximately spans the late 80s through the late 90s. A big hat tip to the Spiceworks Community for its help in fueling this jaunt down memory lane: I posted a call asking for suggestions, which generated more than 100 replies and counting.
So what were IT pros doing two decades ago? "20 years ago I was a system administrator using AS/400, Windows 3.1/NT/Novell with programming experience in RPG/Pascal/C/COBOL," says Ricardo Arias. He's still a system administrator today, but of course, those older technologies have been replaced by the likes of Hyper-V, Windows Server, SQL Server, and Linux.
Not all fits of technology nostalgia are the result of total obsolescence. Vendors and trends come and go. Some platforms simply lose ground to newer hardware, programming languages, and business drivers. You probably won't hear many technologists list COBOL as a cutting-edge code, yet some are quick to point out it's still in use today. IT pro Chris Mears notes that COBOL skills are still in demand among some banks and credit card companies because their systems still depend on the programming language, one of the oldest in computing history. (It was first developed in 1959.)
Also, not everyone agrees on what's outmoded: IBM's AS/400, for instance, made some IT pros' list, Arias's included -- Big Blue first launched the line in 1988. But it has plenty of defenders, too, who note it's still in use today, albeit renamed under the IBM i product family.
Sometimes semantics rule: As times change, so do the words we use to describe things. That's why you're not nearly as likely to see the title "MIS Manager" or its variants in 2013; "IT" has largely replaced the former acronym, which stands in for Management of Information Systems or Management of Information Services. (The "of" is optional in some contexts.)
Chuck Berg, owner of Riverside Computers in Minneapolis, Minn., said:
The MIS Manager broadly referred to the person in charge of computer-based systems that provided tools for organizing, evaluating, and efficiently running a company. As technology has evolved, it has grown to include all manners of communication, automation, and predictive tools. The department managing these tools is now seen less as a cost center and much more as a support and sometimes profit center in many organizations. Information Technology as it is more commonly referred to [as it] seems more descriptive today.
Let's get this time machine going. We've got 10 stops on our retrospective tour. Then it's your turn: What was your job title 20 years ago? Keep the memories -- even the cringe-worthy ones -- coming in the comments.
Ah, the true days of dial-up: Bulletin Board Systems, or BBS. "Back before the web exploded, most online communication was via dialups to bulletin boards," notes IT project manager Matt Novotny. And, yes, it was the job of some unfortunate soul -- sometimes known as a SysOp -- to run the BBS. Novotny adds another subset from the BBS days: Mail Portal Specialist. "This was the guy who managed Blue Wave or other email portal on a BBS -- basically a program that collected your mail and zipped it for download," he says.
(Source: Tim Patterson)
You won't find much call for cc:Mail know-how these days; it was long ago replaced by the likes of Outlook (and Exchange), Gmail, and ubiquitous online email for the masses. In another 20 years -- if that -- it wouldn't be too surprising to see "Exchange Administor" join cc:Mail in the annals of IT history, replaced by "Office 365 Administrator." (Source: Nainil)
You can still get Novell certifications, including Novell Certified Engineer. Suffice it to say the title doesn't carry the same cachet it did in the 90s. "NCEs were hot 20 years ago. Today, the term is unknown to 95% of those who have been in the industry less than 15 years," IT pro Scott Alan Miller says. (Source: KarmaDude)
dBase still exists, but earlier versions of its database programming language might not scream "cutting-edge technologist" on your resume. Mike Johnson, IT administrator with Merrimak Capital Company, did them all, programming dBase II, III, and IV.
"The last program I wrote in dBase was for Rep. Lynne Woolsey, for Woolsey Personnel Service," Johnson says. The congresswoman opened the employment agency in 1980 prior to starting her political career. (Source: Euan Cochrane)
Just 20 years, give or take, prior to today's so-called post-PC era, managing PCs was a full-time IT job. "My first gig was 'PC Specialist' in an MIS Department," says programmer Lisa MacNeill. "My job was to replace all the terminals hooked up to a Unisys mainframe with 386s. The power users got 486s. I can still remember my manager asking 'Who the hell needs a file server sitting on their desk?'"
Indeed, some version of this role garnered several nominations: "PC Programmer," "Computer Operator," "Desktop Technician," "Portables Engineer," "Computer Technician" and even "Electrical Engineer," as examples. "Early laptops were twitchy enough that many companies had a full-time person just to manage them -- also known as the 'executive babysitter,'" Matt Novotny says. (Source: Chris Evans)
Speaking of "MIS Departments," whatever happened to those? The acronym, short for Management Information Systems, isn't extinct -- but it's not exactly in vogue. "Technology" is to the go-to term these days, and job titles have evolved accordingly.
"I've been on this career path for almost 24 years, and one of the major nomenclature changes that I noticed was the overarching term 'Systems' was replaced by 'Technology,'" notes network manager Ray Hahn. "The IS -- Information Systems -- departments became IT -- Information Technology --departments. I used to be Systems Manager, but then the title changed to Network Manager, though the duties stayed the same. I'll bet that 'Systems' is still in use in some places, but it's mostly been displaced."
(Source: Nicholas Thompson)
"My experience from the early to mid-90's is that if you could even spell 'RPG,' there were multiple positions available," recalls IT pro "Krusador."
True enough. Some variety of RPG -- short for Report Program Generator -- programmer popped up repeatedly on memory lane. It sometimes appeared hand-in-hand with IBM's AS/400, the status of which was also fiercely debated. One respondent noted that their county IT department was currently hiring an AS/400 specialist.
"AS/400 s are still in use today," notes IT pro Rodger Sweet. "Granted, they would still qualify [as older], but programming for one in RPG is probably not as prevalent as back then."
There's at least one reason for that: RPG is even older than the AS/400. "RPG brings back memories! My first intern job -- back in 1977, egad! -- was programming RPG II on an IBM System 3," says "KostaVGJ," currently the IT coordinator for a nonprofit in the Denver, Colo. area.
(Source: nSeika)
Once upon a time, Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) was a player in the business technology world, and its VAX lineup of computers was one reason. "DEC had a lot of market share for businesses, and the engineers did everything from PCs and servers to networks to printer maintenance," Matt Novotny recalls. "DEC had good solid equipment."
"DEC all the way," says IT project manager Steven Bohne, who previously worked in IT operations. "[I was a] VAX Basic programmer analyst in 1989. Ouch, that hurts."
Compaq, which later purchased DEC before it was itself acquired by HP, stopped shipping VAX hardware in 2000.
The System Administrator title remains common in IT shops, but it wasn't always so. It may be largely a matter of semantics, but the sys admin role once answered to a variety of other names. "System administrator was beginning to be a term [20 years ago] and was rapidly bubbling to the top, although 'engineer' still reigned," says Scott Alan Miller. "Often what would be roughly an SA today would be called a 'system operator' circa 1994.
(Source: Tim Dorr)
This blast from programming's past netted a few mentions, as did other older languages such as COBOL and Turbo Pascal. "I knew a few people who qualified as 'Fortranosaurus' -- mostly in the high-security clearance aerospace sectors," Matt Novotny says. "I'll bet there are government programs that still have not been ported from Fortran."
Indeed, some IT pros disagreed that certain languages qualified as obsolete. Some noted that plenty of companies still rely on such so-called legacy technologies.
(Source: Joe Shlabotnik)
This blast from programming's past netted a few mentions, as did other older languages such as COBOL and Turbo Pascal. "I knew a few people who qualified as 'Fortranosaurus' -- mostly in the high-security clearance aerospace sectors," Matt Novotny says. "I'll bet there are government programs that still have not been ported from Fortran."
Indeed, some IT pros disagreed that certain languages qualified as obsolete. Some noted that plenty of companies still rely on such so-called legacy technologies.
(Source: Joe Shlabotnik)
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