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Comment by zerr | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what old techies think/thought about being forced to wear suits/ties.

I’ll take a suit and tie that I can remove as soon as I get behind the closed door of my private office over a kegerator, shorts, and an open office hellscape. A piece of cloth around your neck wasn’t the only thing the old days had to offer.

I used to keep a suit and a spare shirt and tie in the office when I worked for a bit Uk company not that long ago.

Used to work at a place with a strict dress code. Despite me being a designer and despite us working in a grotty little office with no visitors, suits and ties were mandatory.

We had a couple of shared ties we’d drag out whenever we had a meeting with the chief exec. They were coffee stained and chewed but we were wearing ties and that was all that mattered to him.

I worked for a company that had a pile of laundered white shirts and blouses lying around solely for picture day.

Precisely. I used to work at a “have to wear a tie” place. Guess how often that tie came out of my messenger bag. “Hey, that big client is coming today...”

Looking at old pictures is not a reliable way to suss the day-to-day of “the old days”, any more than looking at your Facebook pictures indicates how much you drink/eat/rock climb.

What struck me is that somebody had time to code all those visual and audio effects (which may have taken days or at least hours, given the hardware). I can't see something like that happening in today's Agile world. The people in the video, despite their suits and ties, seem freer than us.

I think the visual and audio effects are implemented by reusing the test programs. Just like late 80s home computers and today's microcontrollers, a basic visual and audio demo was pretty common on large computers back to those days. But yeah, it still may have taken days or at least hours.

Some of the pics of really early computers show people in Lab coats and given the amount of fast rotating machinery in old kit ties might not be that safe.

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