I started a career in Information Systems before I had ever used a computer.
As a Gen Xer my formative years span a time of simplicity to an era of complexity. I grew up with black and white TV, rotary phones, in a time before microwave ovens. My entire primary and secondary education experience was one without computers, until the day my high school was issued a personal computer. And that computer went to the head of the P.E. department. I still scratch my head about that decision.
I marvel that I chose to study Information Systems at university without any exposure to computers beyond seeing Wargames at the cinema. Especially surprising was to find out I was pretty good at it. During my uni days my hands on experience with computers came either from working on assignments in the lab or demonstrating how to load a game into a commodore 64 while working in electronics at Kmart. Neither of these demonstrated a need to have a computer at home.
My first few years in the industry as a developer was exclusively on mainframe applications, accessing TSO/ISPF green screens via dumb terminals and connecting with co-workers via mainframe messaging systems.
In early 1990's I attended a training course to learn UML and Rational Rose, I thought they were the way to go and was super excited until I returned to my workplace to find the only computer available to load Rational Rose onto didn't have the capacity to run it. Worse still there was no budget to order a computer that could run the software. But hey, at least I ticked the box on my personal development plan of attending a training course.
What strikes me looking back is that even as a professional developer working on enterprise systems there was still no compelling reason to own a computer at home. That's almost unimaginable today.
That changed in the mid 90's.
My first real use of a personal computer at work was around 1995, using a PC and emulator to access a mainframe operating system. It was likely also the first time I used corporate email. I may have even played a few games of solitaire. That experience was all the persuasion I needed. By mid-1996 I had a Compaq Presario Pentium PC with 4GB hard drive in my hot little hands - and thought I was something.
Those early years of my career coincided with a broader shift in tertiary education. Universities began pivoting their curriculum to be client-server heavy driven by the industry hype that client-server would replace mainframe. This was about the time that referring to mainframe application as "legacy" went mainstream.
By 2000's universities had removed mainframe content from their curricula.
It's from around this point that universities stopped introducing students to mainframe technologies, reinforcing the idea that anything labelled "legacy" was something to move away from rather than understand.
My original take is that this is where the industry began to lose its pipeline of enterprise computing knowledge.
Stay tuned, part 3 dropping soon.