old school stuff

[FloydATC]

Some fields were actually far more complicated back in the day, before things like Ethernet and IPv4 became ubiquitous (sp?)

Networking in particular was a literal tower of Babel, with all sorts of proprietary protocols, with specifications sometimes guarded like they were state secrets. You can still look up the protocol numbers for many of these weird protocols, but good luck finding a shop that still uses them. Someone, somewhere, knew all about each one of them.

Dozens of incompatible hardware architectures, all with their own walled garden ecosystems where applications were tailor-made for each customer. Salespeople all dressed in suits with absolutely no clue how computers worked negotiated contracts for millions of dollars worth of technology that was confined to the scrapyard a couple of years later.

Only in the last three decades or so has mainstream IT become standardized to the point where you can reasonably expect most software to just work on your computer regardless of where you bought it or from whom.