This week’s topic on old-school technologies hasn’t really inspired me…….not sure why, but it may have something to do with my poor memory.  I joke with friends about not remembering what I had last night for supper, but it’s true that a lot of my past has turned into a hazy recollections.

And that also applies to the “old school” technologies that I grew up with.  Believe me, they weren’t old school at the time!

So, which technologies had the most influence on my career (and feel free to contribute yours) ?

For me, let’s see……

1960′s:  card punch machines at university with overnight turn-around on processing

1970′s:  Datapoint 2200 casstte tape minicomputers with Decision Data 96 column cardpunches;  Telidon; Wang word processors; X.25; fax machines

1980′s:  The PC of course; Commodore Amiga; email; OSI (especially important for me)

1990′s:  World wide web; Cisco routers; Word and Powerpoint

2000′s:  ITIL, Blackberry, iPhone  (although its hard to call these old school yet), Blogging Idol

2012′s:  Nothing old school yet.  I wonder what will come next?

The overall winner for me is OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) which is a set of ISO standards that were built between 1978 and the early 90s, and which were similar in nature to the Internet…..but which never made it commercially.  I was involed in helping develop the standards, and spent a good number of brain cells on the topic.  Even wrote a book back in 1990.  It also launched my consulting career.

Was there a similar influencing technology in your career?