In Kansas City, most of the local stations all signed off at 9AM.

I thought it fitting that WDAF-TV4 ended their broadcast with

1. a crude "1949-2009" graphic
2. A few seconds of the old indian head test pattern
3. A video of the old stars and stripes video they always used at signoff everyday

Followed by a "ceremony" with some backoffice engineers pushing the big button you aren't supposed to press.

Walked into my first real tech job in 1995 at a local ISP and discovered Linux (Slackware 3.0 and I think 2.2).

We were using it to run CERN web servers on Pentium 75 desktop and 486/33 class machines on 8 megs of ram.

I remember was being knee deep in swap all the time. That were were running a .99 kernel forever, and that in todays environment we'd have our lunch eaten because the boxes were running (and using) every usable service known to man at the same time (http / SMTP / DNS / nntp / pop3).

We had to setup remote reboot capabilities because a local television station would flash their website on the screen during the nightly news and we'd get murdered when they posted an .au audio file of the evening news.

On linux specific stuff, I just remember the lack of loadable modules, answering hundreds of yes/no questions to recompile the kernel, no SSH anywhere to be seen and it being a big deal when we installed stuff like top.

Back in the bad old days before I worked in IT. I worked in a call center / customer order entry for a place that sold various holiday pastries and such products.

We had people FAX us checks all the time, and than call up and get abusively angry at the agents because their order was not processed (They usually neglected to put a phone number on the form to).

The only thing sillier at that job was the phone system, antiqated even for the day. The order taker would push a button after each call to signal the ACD that she was ready for the next call. Of course every holiday we'd clean out the temp agencies of agents, a good percentage of which would choose to take a call and than read for the rest of their shift if somebody didn't come over and push the button for them.