[LocalMan]

Writing code in a commercial IT shop in the late seventies, the manager though he was progressive since he guaranteed that we could get as many as one compilation per day. We'd submit punched cards and get back the card deck and a compile listing when it was done.

Hardware was less reliable, occasionally coming up with the wrong results. One time the result was wrong because the printer had printed the wrong digit! I'd spent hours desk checking the code only to find the code was right. So I ran it again.

It was much more normal for managers to really not know what a computer really is. This included programming and IT managers. One very accomplished boss asked me, in a meeting, how long it took to write a program. What kind of program? I asked. Oh, a general program. That put me in a no-win situation. If I said a year, he'd pop a cork and get all red-faced. If I said two weeks, he'd hold me to it no matter what the program was supposed to do.