Remember when I joined my first construction / mech service company in 1986 and they had just got a ......... fax machine! Still had the telex machine beside it. weird thing was they also had 3D cad machines Sun Sparkstation and Eagle Software package. The Sparkstations were $35k a pop. I had just bought a 1br terrace in Balmain for $58k
Not weird really as they had been around since the mid 70s. I was writing 3D modelling software in the early 80s! But expensive machines, yes!
Client’s phones, like this, on a long extension was my site phone when I started building.....and we had to justify every call against the Telecom bill! Cheers, Mark
1st full time job and I had my own phone - 1971 ..... job involved calling other banks to see if someone had sufficient funds to cash or clear a cheque AND what was called Opinions which once again involved calling other banks to see if people were good for a specific amount of money (an shorter route for a credit check). Bit of irony where one of the mates from High School was doing the same job in the ANZ Bank straight across the road in Martin Place & Pitt Street, Sydney. The old Telex machines ..... remember them also, as they were used by the Secretary's Department to send messages to and receive them from overseas Banks.
Roneo and Gestetner copying machines......you had to keep replacing the methylated spirits and ink and crank the handle to produce copies......! Now you can bluetooth a doc. to a wireless printer.......and in colour ! Cheers, Mark
And the ammonia printers for copying the AO drawings. we were only allowed to copy the relevant drawings for each sub-trade. The Mech Elect didn’t get the pipe layouts and schematics. Suppliers didn’t get drawings - relevant specification pages only. Now I get 15GB of EVERYTHING in an Aconex dump. Here - addendum 25. something changed. Find it - consultant didn’t cloud the change. You get the following - Lights, toilet fixtures, landscaping.... everything
The ammonia printer was special, especially when as a Junior Architect in Chippendale in 1986 I had to change over the rubber plugs in the top of the amonia bottles in the unventilated basement and you got that head spinning wiff if you were too slow and needed to take a breath while the plug was out!! The Architects used to tell me the ammonia would make me sterile so just don't breath, 4 kids later i figured they were joking! At least the ammonia printer produced dry prints so you could make one pile, an advancement on the wet prints produced from the diline printer that had to be placed/hung all arount the room till they dried, time consuming when doing 200 prints!!
Yep, 64 Rose Street Chippendale, 3 doors up from the Duck & Swan which was on Cleavland Street, my boss had bought it to turn it into an Architects office not long before I started working there, prior to that it was the Snows Confectionery factory where they used to make "Metro Gum", remember that!!
First computer I used when I started work. 128 kilobytes of memory, 10 megabyte disc drive consisting of two 5mb platers - one removable and the size of a serving tray. And we did airborne geophysics processing with it!
Medical GP’s, Specialists and Chemists STILL have fax machines. It’s the most secure way to send confidential information, as it only goes from one machine to another, on a telephone line, as opposed to (Hackable) emails across the internet.
Coincidentally I had a discussion about this with my GP only recently. However, since Covid minus 19, they are now sending and accepting scripts via email.
