On Sun, 2022-08-28 at 17:06 -0700, Keith Smith via PLUG-discuss wrote:

> In the early 80's I heard about operators.  Never did meet an operator.

In the days of mainframes and groups of minicomputers (VAX, PDP-11, etc) they had
server rooms, air conditioned down into the low 70s or high 60s. They were noisy,
foreboding places. I know because, during a dispute with an igno manager, I stopped
working in the office and started working second shift in the server room. My
productivity probably went up at least 50 percent.

Patrolling the server room was a man or woman called a computer operator, or
"operator" for short. The operator moved from tape drive to tape drive, backing up
machines and installing things. They tended to a fleet of 132 character tractor feed
printers, putting print jobs in the proper in boxes, and installing new paper when
the printers ran out. In time-sharing environments, they'd schedule jobs. And most
important, when a program crashed, they'd either restart it or try to fix it, and if
they couldn't, they'd call the programmer. In the 1970's I had a programmer
girlfriend, and she regularly got 2am phone calls telling her to drive to the server
room *right now*.

Every computer operator I ever met was a nice person and was interested in
cooperating with programmers. They knew the value of programmers, and programmers
knew the value of operators.

When easy to use MS-DOS took over, any intelligent person could be their own
operator, so operator positions declined dramatically. But I'll bet they still have
operators (no matter what they're called today) in large server arrays for the big
online providers. Somebody needs to physically swap the bad hard disk or swap the
computer that stopped working.

SteveT
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