1980. Almost done with my Bachelor's Degree.
This will be a post about how times have changed in 45 years.
I was lucky enough to land my first professional job in the accounting/financial field before my degree requirements were completed.
Following are some things that I remember about this that were drastically different from the way things are today.
Job was posted in a HUGE ad in an actual paper newspaper. I sent in a paper resume and paper cover letter. I knew someone who worked at the institution I was applying at. This person went to university with me as well...we were friends. He had worked at this institution for several years, working his way up through the ranks to a management position by the time I applied to this job. I called him on the phone to ask him if he could elevate my resume to upper management, and put a good word in for me. He did. There was no internet, no hiring websites, no "keywords" to make sure were in your resume so some hiring software at the company would flag my resume as a possible hire.
Got called in for an interview. 3 piece suit for the interview.
Got hired. 3 piece suit everyday for the job. You went to work without suit pants, a suit jacket and a vest? Too bad. Go home and change and then come back. Very strict dress code. Go home and put one on. There was no such thing as "business casual".
First day on the job. I got an actual office, with a door that could be closed and locked. no cubicle farms here. Spacious. high ceilings. HUGE desktop calculator on the desk. The kind that also generated a paper receipt. Introductions made, then I was brought to my office. Sat down in an executive chair. Looked around and thought "fuck, this is pretty nice". Boss comes in with a phone book. Slaps it down on my desk. I said "What's this"? He said "It's a phone book". I laughed and said "And"? He said "You're going to be spending the next two days, all day, adding up the phone numbers". I said "What"? He said "You need to learn how to use that calculator with speed, and without looking at the keys". It's kind of like learning how to type. He showed me how to place my fingers on the center rows of keys, and how to roll my hand to hit the "+" sign. He said to spend two days adding up the phone book, and to concentrate on my speed.
So I did that for two days, and got fast on the calculator. There were no personal computers, no Microsoft Excel.
After I learned to be speedy on the calculator, I got a small assignment. "Do a spreadsheet for this account" type of thing. Boss brought in a 20 pound bound stack of green bar computer paper and told me the account number. He gave me some A size spreadsheet paper. "Show me that you can do a simple spreadsheet". I opened that 20 pound stack of computer paper to the right account, wrote down the name of the account on the spreadsheet, wrote down the account balance, drew 2 lines under the balance, and handed it to my boss. He looked at it and said "Good. most people right out of college can't figure out how to write numbers on actual spreadsheet paper. I laughed and said "OK".
The next 3 years were dominated by closets, actual closets, full of binders containing green bar computer paper. Every time you had to do any analysis, you would have to get a wheeled cart, take it to a closet, break your back moving these God awful heavy binders around, and find the one you needed. There were no personal computers to store information on. Every thing was on paper. There was only a mainframe computer, in the basement, that generated these primitive green bar reports. The General ledger, etc.
Except for when a 4 inch thick hand written report was prepared for a regulatory agency every year. A cost allocation model had to be run that was impossible to do by hand. So how was that done? With a Radio Shack Tandy(?) computer that used an old portable black and white TV as the monitor. Data was stored on a cassette music tape, and fed into the computer with this shitty little music cassette player.
PC's did not exist. Non-mainframe software did not exist. Hand written spreadsheets were the order of the day. Make a mistake? Get out the liquid white-out, or use white out tape. Use these white erasers that were held in a pen-like device. Erase so much that you would go through several per week.
Mechanical pencils.
Voicemail did not exist.
Try to transfer a phone call? Good luck. you would lose the call every time.
Have to do a flowchart to develop a new system? Get out your mechanical pencil and a plastic template with circles and triangle on it, and draw a flowchart by hand so you can convey it to the mainframe IT guy so he could write a program. You can do all of that stuff now by yourself, using various user friendly software.
"Word processors" existed, but all they did was process words as you typed them, and then printed them out. They were not computers, and they were expensive. When the department finally bought one, an elaborate cost benefit analysis had to be performed to justify its purchase.
Here is why I am thinking about all this.
I just saw a Chyron on TV that said something like "TikTok to be banned on Sunday".
What if someone who fell asleep in 1980 just woke up, saw that chyron, and asked you what Tiktok was?
Well, first you would have to explain what the internet was.
Then you would have to explain about smart phones, videos on smart phones, texting, apps, personal computers, Excel, word processing programs, power point, etc. oh, and you would also have to explain how your phone was a camera, and could also make high quality videos.
Then you would have to explain about social media, videos you can create yourself, misinformation, disinformation, etc.
And after explaining this to the 1980 guy, he would probably just look at you, laugh, and say "get the fuck out of here with your bullshit"!
= new reply since forum marked as read
Sorry, i'm a bit slow today! 
You made me recall the old right hand/left hand switcheroo! 
I knew some people who could do that, but I always had to use my right hand on the keys. Thought I was a real badass because I was so fast on the keys. 
Got my first PC at a different job, also around 1995. It was a novelty then.
The guy who worked in the cubicle next to me would look up pictures of naked women while I was busting my ass with work. The pictures would load really slow from the top down, and I could hear him whisper in frustration over the cubicle wall as the picture was trying to load "C'mon. c'mon already".
It was ugly.
after a four year stint in the military.....so I remember! 
