The deterioration of IT

I work in an IT office of a pretty big company and it seems I'm the only person here who can code, troubleshoot mac, linux, windows and development work. 13 staff and all the rest have MS qualifications - but have never used another OS and if it isnt MS related then are of no help. A bit like being a mechanic that can only fix a mini. I find IT is being changed to admin work where, for example, email - rather than being run from a server maintained by staff - is now a web service an by a large corporate (office 365 etc)

Next Ray will be telling us that most people on his street had a Motorola 8000X, like all those working class families in the mid 80's did.

I knew someone who bought a SGI indy once.

Tough crowd... :) Crusty BOFH.

Was that a big thing in your area, lots of pensioners in bedsits with the latest expensive computers.

Amazing what you can find .

My 486 33dx in 92 came with a 40mb and I upgraded almost immediately to 80mb.

Windows 95 / Chicago was a cool time to be in commuting.

Like @maccored I can work in unix based OS's and Windows OS's and I have worked in tech departments where people in the department struggled if it wasn't windows based. Unix based stuff is from another planet in some cases.

@[Deleted User] it is not just the Public Sector that is contracting their Dec/Tech or IT departments, it is also in the private sector as well. I worked in a company that decided it would transfer its IT department to a 3rd party, including transferring all staff to this company, but they soon found out it was not as great as it seemed on paper, firstly they lost all the staff with the IT knowledge, the company that took over to make money then offshored the IT work and then another problem they encountered was if they wanted anything done outside of the contract they were charged an arm and a leg also add into the fact that the other departments in the company that could just contact the IT department with an issue and it would be resolved quickly now found that they had to jump through numerous hoops to get the problem looked at. The amount of companies that did this but then just ended up after a number of years bringing the IT back in house again when the contract ran out. It just doesn't work because as the companies realised they are now just one of many customers these IT companies deal with and now don't get preferential treatment they were used to when the IT department was in house.

Not just IT skills.

The IT staff acquire business domain knowledge from working with the systems that mirror that business knowledge and processes.

It's this business knowledge that is lost once you outsource or have rapid churn of staff.

Another aspect of this. IT skills are perishable.

If you don't do something regularly you eventually will forget how to do it, or not be as quick at it.

So if you bypass your IT staff with contractors and outsourcing (or silo it in one or two people) you will degrade everyone's else's skillset to the point where you can no longer use them as backup if the contractor or outsourcing becomes unavailable.

Where were you living, Bangladesh?

You're falling into almost exactly the same mistake Flinty made.

The proportion of "all households" with a computer is irrelevant, but "all households with kids" is almost as irrelevant.

The main appeal of getting a Spectrum or C64 or whatever to (largely) play games on was to boys aged approx 10-15. Guess what, Ray was (I am presuming) a boy in that agegroup at that time, and so was I. So really you need to look only at households who had a son (sorry ladies) aged roughly 10-15 at the time.

It really shouldn't be hard to understand. Most of the population then either didn't know about home computers or had no interest in them whatsoever, not being in the small segment of the population who had the greatest appeal for these devices (and many of that group didn't have much interest either).

But 100% of my classmates in the early 80s were boys aged 10-15, funny thing statistics, innit... 🙄

There's no way you could describe where I grew up in Dublin as middle class, but I got a Spectrum for Christmas 1983 (had to dib in what remained of my confimation money though) and I wasn't the first in my class either. By 1985 or so close to half of us would have had a computer in the house, usually a Spectrum or C64, maybe shared with siblings, but it was there, it existed, it was not made up. Most would have had a VCR by then too though we didn't get one until the world cup in 1990, on dubious "moral" rather than financial grounds.

Another odd claim made in this thread was that it was mid/late 80s until most people had colour TVs. By the end of the 70s the only people I knew of who still had B/W TVs were old age pensioners.

For what it's worth, most households in the UK had colour TV by 1976:

Ray wasn't talking about a bunch of kids playing games on a cheap computer. He was talking of a near 2k machine in 81 used for doing accounts and swapping files with the accountant. Pretty impressive for 10yr as you now reveal. But as he says this wasn't unusual in his area, but in fact was common.

The mistake I made was not stats. But not realizing working class areas after a hard day down the pit, could come home to 50%+ of them having computers was thing in the early 80s, including pensioners in bedsits. That Ireland was so vastly ahead of the UK in computer ownership during a decade of recession, unemployment and emigration.

I realise was probably sheltered from all this technological wealth, not being from a poor working class area.

As you say I'm just reading the stats wrong.

Wow trail blazing stuff. Must have been amazing to be involved in computing in those years.

Probably an Amiga 4000 or such.

So people in Dublin who had access to 3 UK channels in full colour on cable wouldn't get a colour TV because Gay Byrne was in black and white? Pull the other one...