...who I won't name and shame because despite their lack of technical nounce they actually had a lot going for them from my perspective, such as:

Everything was well documented. Amazingly so - they had records of installs going back over a decade so when it came time to upgrade servers, we had ready access to detailed install docs for all of their applications - including any gotchas that had been encountered!

They were actually incredibly pleasant people to work with (well the IT peeps were - some of the users were... difficult... such as the woman who logged a complaint because someone had deleted her username from the Windows login box and how could she be expected to remember it? Or the one who complained because the roving IT helper moved one of the icons on her desktop an inch to the side and she "couldn't find it" etc) and they had that very unique feature that they knew they had limited knowledge.

Not that they let that be a barrier to their occasionally randomly trying / changing things.

And even now, almost 20 years later, that site still features regularly in my anecdotes.

... I expected three sheets crammed into the laser printer all at once, including thin black sheet between each pair!

I visited a firm years ago in the US where the colour of the paper was very important. For stock control Clients were sent white copies of orders, pink was for office retention and blue was for stock moves. The latter meant it wasn’t an external sale just a transfer between sites, departments etc. This was apparently a hangover from the days of 3 ply order forms and no one had wanted to change it. So there were three large printers each filled with a particular colour paper. It worked for them then but I hope they’ve moved on a bit since. Seeing the large number of A4 ring binders stuffed with pink and blue paper was quite a sight.

Their IT systems were built in house and impressive given they were able to tell me where my order was and when it would arrive at their location for me to pick up.

Obligatory Dilbert: https://dilbert.com/strip/1993-03-03

I have fond memories of Uniplex. The documents were stored as plain text files - very efficient and you could fix problems with vi. It was very easy to generate letters too. I had a shell script that did it. My record/cassette/CD/VHS/DVD database system is all written in bash, using text files. Yes it has been suggested I have "problems".

Yes it has been suggested I have "problems".

Your problem is that you're smart enough to not only know, but understand, "if it's not broken, don't fix it". This means they can't sell you the latest and greatest (and expensive) new, improved solution they want to sell you. Keep it up!

It raises the question of what was done with the different coloured (or otherwise) copies. Did they eventually move to an online filing system to make them unnecessary?

My local builders' merchant has just moved from NCR pads (one copy for the office, one for the customer to keep and one for the customer to hand to the lads in the yard to tell them what to load. They now print out the two sheets for the customer and yard (I'm not sure if they print a third for the office). However as NCR paper is necessarily flimsy whilst the printer paper isn't and the printed version is A4 whilst the NCR was about A5 they're now using much more paper.

My first company (80s) used "ping-pongs" - not sure of the real name. An A5 pad for raising project queries with three of those flimsy sheets which copied through without carbon paper. The sheets were yellow, pink and white and there were date, "From" and To" boxes. You wrote your query or logged your fault in a box In the top half, then tore off the the top sheet and popped it in a purpose-made tray on your desk. The remaining two sheets were put in the internal mail and the recipient responded, kept a sheet and sent the bottom sheet back.

It worked really well - and the office had a proper secretary who you could ask to go through your ping-pongs and chase up people who hadn't responded.

"copied through without carbon paper"

NCR - No Carbon Required. Alternatively National Cash Registers who made the NCR Tower - 68k-based Unix boxes.

I once had a very effective visit to the end users as we diagnosed a problem that was only manifesting itself in the wild ( [1]described here ). We did good work and made many friends, only to see it all undone by a field tech two days later. I've seen things you people would find all too easy to believe.

[1] https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2017/07/21/on_call/#c_3240308

When consulting, ALWAYS ask the secretary about the Boss's computer knowledge. You can save a lot of time and trouble for a lot of people over the long haul.

I know of several C*-types of Fortune-500s who make a big show of "checking the computer", even though their network cable was "accidentally" never installed.

I can't count the number of times I've swapped the Boss's top of the line CPU, gathering dust and spiderwebs under his credenza/return, artfully changing screensavers every couple minutes, for his secretary's underpowered kit ... without the Boss noticing.

After one consulting job, I didn't give a Sr. VP of a Fortune 150 the password to his brand new, triple-headed, US$7,500 desktop PC. This was back in 2007. He never even tried to log into it for the four years that it sat on his credenza, artfully cycling through screensavers. How do I know? Because I'm the only person who ever had the password. He never asked me for it, and his secretary refused when I offered it to her ... Over that four years, about once a quarter he called me up to take a look at it under warranty because "it did something funny". When I checked the logs, the last person to login was myself ... three months earlier. So I closed it down, opened it up, vacuumed it out, buttoned it back up, turned it on, cleared the logs and proclaimed it "fixed", The Boss thanked me every time. The secretary & IT staff also thanked me every time I came out, for keeping him out of their hair. I almost wish that I allowed them to renew the contract after the four years ...

As always, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions ...

Once I had a really urgent request to install some software. This involved a courier to got and get the tape etc.

I installed it over the weekend, and told the users it was available.

After a week I went round and said "do you want the password?" - cue lots of red faces.

only to see it all undone by a field tech two days later

Field circus engineers - always good for a horror story, though preferably at someone else's expense.

[Icon nearest to an eldritch horror.]

Hobnobs - just saying the word conjures up visions of Rowan Atkinson marking the attendance register. Those who know will understand what I mean.

And chocolate ones are delicious.

>>And chocolate ones are delicious.

With the caveat that it must be plain chocolate enrobing the oaty goodness. The milk choc ones are an abomination and must be fed to unknowing children.

Sadly I can no longer eat oats (for the sake of people around me), so the guilty pleasure of devouring an entire packet of plain chocolate hobnobs is forever denied me.

No, the chocolate ones are mandatory.

In the early 90s I worked on a system that produced worksheets for folk going out to do jobs. The system printed two pages per job (something like a general job sheet plus a bill of materials). For reasons lost to the mists of time, one sheet was always printed on white paper, the other on blue. In the office, someone had to load the HP LaserJet 2 printer with alternating sheets of white and blue paper. A very time-consuming exercise.

All-too-frequently the printer would accidentally grab two sheets at once, meaning that for any subsequent prints the colour-coding of the printouts was reversed which, short of the complete end of the world, was apparently the worst thing that could happen.

It took far too long and far too many on-site visits to convince them that it'd be cheaper and more efficient to simply get a second printer and so have one for white paper and another for blue. If I recall correctly, the second printer that they introduced was actually a spare that had been sitting unused in the office all that time.

I spent a couple of weeks at a customer working on an upgrade.

Our company had a rep attached to the customer who seemed to spend most of his time wandering around and chatting to people and not doing very much.

There was a problem with a database which had been going on for about a week. One of our company's database guys came on site, and quickly identified the problem, and spent the rest of the day doing a health check and answering database questions.

On the last day of my visit, I was having a beer with the rep who told me how he worked. In his wandering around he would hear about problems. He would then have a coffee with the manager of the area and say "I hear you have a problem with ... I can get a specialist in for a day to help at this ... cost" or "It sounds you are getting a bit short of CPU, I can get a salesperson in to discuss upgrades etc".

He would also quietly coordinate between different departments and say "do you think you could pop over to ... this afternoon, they have a question for you"

As a result there were few big problems, and the customer said overall it was a cost efficient solution. Our company got additional sales, and on site support contracts.

He did so well he was promoted to area manager, and hated every minute of it, because he was not working with customers.

.... I visited one of our satellite offices to set up some serial terminal remote connection over WAN software, mainly so that that office could still operate during the frequent serial network failures that were out of our control.

Whilst there I was asked to look at a couple of other issues, and resolved a printer not working (the network lead was missing) and a PC that would crash the network after it was move from one office to another (the make before break thinnet wall socket was upside down). My boss called me in when I got back to the main office to pass on the praise from the manager of the satellite office. Only for me to let loose on the fact that one of my cow-orker and our third party support company had been out to both of these issues on several occasions, and had successfully failed to resolve them.

Anyone but me remember "bursting" mainframe print jobs? How about jobs that included carbon paper copies? Doing this job manually, one would invariably get thoroughly coated in ink/carbon.Worse, I would regularly manage to get fairly bad paper cuts in the web between my left thumb and index finger. To this day, I have a "smudge" tattoo in that location.

Yep, but we had an auto burster and collator. Cue endless arguments between ourselves, the machine maintenance people and the paper suppliers about why it didn't work.

Machine blamed paper, paper blamed machine and they both blamed us for the storage conditions.

First company I worked for had a barrel printer that lived in its own room, since even with its acoustic hood it was phenomenally loud. It was also the size of two photocopiers.

This was in the mid 1990s, and the beast had been printing monthly invoices for at least ten years, so the more commonly used letters had started to become very indistinct from the repeated battering they took, but I doubt a replacement barrel could be sourced by that point.

Terrifying to be stood near the thing when it was going - the whole room would shake, but it was incredibly fast at printing each invoice run.

never under estimate the benefit of just spending a day in a client office, nibbling biscuits and just talking (and listening)

It's something I miss with Covid and working from home. Those coffee machine chats that could lead to early warning of upcoming problems.

Cargo cult behaviour...

Come join the modern UK civil service, it's a wonderful world.

A university I worked at had a multi part carbon registration form. Every student got one. Every year they redesigned it and every year I had a nightmare trying to get the bloody thing to print from the huge dot matrix printer they spent a fortune maintaining. At a meeting I suggested that it might be better to have a standard A4 and perhaps distribute the form electronically to the relevant parts (registry, exams, teaching department and student). The head a registry exploded on the spot and came close to shouting at me in (the lowly sysadmin) a large meeting. I was even prepared to configure a posh laser printer with multiple trays if they wanted to have different colours.

Other than that, it was a great gig and I became friends with the head of Registry.

When we moved from dedicated fax machines to MFDs the staff were absolutely insistent that, "Faxes must be on green paper!" It took the engineer a while to figure that one out! Fortunately the machines were multi-tray so the default tray on the machine was the one with the green paper, then the white paper tray was set as default in the printer drivers.

It only really ended when we stopped receiving faxes, except for the bl**dy bank who are unable to supply certain documents any other way - we now have Fax to Email for those.

I would have simply kept on munching the biscuits and not said anything.

It's been my experience that any such "interference in business processes" is met by hostility and anger. If it's not costing you anything personally, keep your mouth shut.

I remember trying to explain word wrap and margins to a secretary that insisted on hitting return at the end of every line in Wordstar. That was a waste of half a day.

"I remember trying to explain word wrap and margins to a secretary that insisted on hitting return at the end of every line"

A few posters here seem to have the same habit.

HOB-NOBody print :-D