Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saurik | Hacker News Reader

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As a kid who grew up with a father who worked from home, I will say I loved it, though. I knew I shouldn't bother him much while he's working... but I could if I really needed to, and he was around if something important happened. His flexible working conditions also meant he could be a part of everything and take you places and then you'd want to do something he'd find boring and he'd just say "I'll sit on this bench, come get me when you're done" and he'd put in a half hour of work in the middle of nowhere as he could (his job also was for a company half a world away, and so he didn't really need to be in contact with them constantly--pre-Internet--or work very specific hours). So like... it might be a bit harder on you--particularly when the kid is young enough to not understand "work"--but I feel incredibly lucky that my father did that (and like, he actually was gone three months of the year to work for that company "in the office"... but I still feel like I got much more of a father than anyone else I knew).

Yes, familywise it's great, I just came back from a 1h lunch break on the beach digging sand castles for a good 30 minutes of it with them all, something impossible with any other setup.

Not impossible at all. I know two companies near the beach where people surf during lunch.

With their kids?

Shit are you the "saurik"? Oh man, thanks for all the work you put into Cydia and all that. Seriously you are awesome.

This is why HN is special!

Yes, their kids and spouse come to that beach

Sorry, I'm too young, I have a feeling this question will seem very dumb to older folks—what work can you do remotely without the internet?

I guess a lot of stuff happened over the phone? If you write a document, how do you send it to others? Did he use a fax machine, maybe?

The answer to your direct question is, in fact, "fax". The digital fax machines that started to come out were able to send documents without much loss and then print multiple copies of them (rather than essentially attaching a modem directly to a glorified receipt printer like earlier ones had).

He had a Palm Pilot he would scribble on a lot to work out of the house when those became a thing, and he had one of the first actually-portable laptop computers. We (he involved me in a lot of his process of learning tech) tested out early tablet computing devices (running Windows 3.0 "for Handwriting" ;P).

Any intellectual work that typically traded on paper.

-Design jobs like architecture and drafting

-Small device repairs (where the device is high value and can be mailed)

-Creative labor like copy writing, editing, etc

Also, where I grew up in rural Montana, a lot of jobs that are considered to require an office but which can be done over the phone were worked remotely up until recently. Sales in many industries was done over the phone with people stationed throughout the Western U.S. states, each managing about a 100,000-300,000 sq mi area.

I didn't technically ever work without internet access, but since it required an expensive long distance phone call (10 to 25c per minute) over a 2400bps modem, most work time was offline.

I'd typically do a short dialup call in the morning and one in the evening to upload emails I queued up to send, download any emails I received and sync up code repositories.

Honestly I often wish for similar conditions today (except the 2400bps part!). The productivity and mental peace of zero distractions all day long was so much better.

As to how to work? No different from today really. Sync up the code repositories and do all development locally for the day. Or work on architecture/design documents.

I sometimes seek that peaceful working condition by working remote at locations with no signal. Wish I could do it more often.

There are different answers to this, depending on what "without the internet" means. Pre-internet it was phone or fax, but early internet it was intermittent/dial-up internet, meaning you could do offline work that you upload later. Even during ADSL neither I or any service on the internet relied on always-online assumptions. Think git (but before actual git).

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