My dad's resume and skills from 1980
When I first entered the working world as a programmer and administrator of an &quot;academic computing center&quot;, in the early 70s, you met men like Ray - ex-military, GI-bill educated, learned computers from the electricity on up in their mid-career, rather frequently, either as customer engineers for one of the big mainframe manufacturers (there were 7 or 8, depending on when and how you counted), or from the minicomputer upstarts who were then assaulting the mainframe world of computing with their smaller, cheaper, 12 and 16 bit newcomers.   Sometimes you&#x27;d get the privilege of a lunch or dinner with one sent out &quot;from the lab&quot; who was actually designing and building the machines you were working on.<p>It&#x27;s hard to explain just how new it all felt, then.   But in 1973, even though we were sitting on the cusp of the single chip microprocessor and personal computer revolution, the commercial computer was less than 20 years old, and college recruiting materials might well brag that at their institution, there were not one, but two computers on campus.  I remember the day the total RAM at our institution passed the megabyte mark - closer to the end, than the beginning, of the 1970s.  The ability to &quot;program&quot; was a rare skill - even the people  who taught it were still just learning it.