23 Things Only 90s Sysadmins Will Remember

PCMCIA = "People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms"

Oddly, that's one I had memorized. It actually stands for PC Memory Card International Association. (That one I didn't memorize; I had to look it up.)

Ghost... such fond memories. I was like black magic to be able to pull a drive running out of space, ghost it to a new larger drive, while resizing the partition, and stick it back in the server and just boot it up.

Few if any of these would be limited to 90s sysadmins. If you were an office worker in the 90s this stuff is almost all familiar.

We still use Lotus Notes at work, except that it is called IBM Notes nowadays. Some legacy applications are still in process of being ported to Sharepoint (which is itself in process of being migrated from 2013 to 2016). Happy to say we do use Outlook for a few years instead of Lotus.

Regarding ZIP drivers, I had such drive in my personal computer. There were several variants of hardware, both in allowed ZIP disk size and formatting. Some ZIP disks were Mac-formatted and no way to get those working on Windows. I wonder if that was a technical or artificial limitation.

The nostalgia is super high in this one. I still have all my AOL & Netscape CD's laying around somewhere. As well as some old zip drives, floppies and my original Gateway desktop along with an old IBM machine.

I should dust them off and see if they still run.

I didn't even realize at the time T1 meant 1.54mbps; we definitely take for granted the speed today (currently at 250mbps for roughly ~$60USD/mo).

Great article :).

Score one for the 3270 emulation. I worked for a small company in the mid 90s whose software was used to connect to the mainframes that airlines used for scheduling. We provided software that allowed for dial-up access to those systems from home (among other things). The core software was built in Delphi and was basically a dialer married to a 3270 emulator.

After reading this, I was surprised to learn that in the 90s I was a sysadmin.

Apart from EBCDIC and 3270 emulators, which are uncommon but in daily use in IBM-addicted environment such as banks, disk imaging software is still relevant.

Is it a competition? I made 20/23 in this quiz.

ESF, B8ZS.

Great article. Hacker News paydirt!