Good Old Days
The First Systems Architect
In the mid-70s, I was the 7th employee of a new consulting firm in Ottawa (Canada) - SHL Systemhouse Ltd. and worked for two years building computerized cartographic systems for Australia. We then got interested in configuring minicomputers (which were still quite new) for turnkey business applications and proceeded to quote and develop systems right across Canada. One of my jobs was to prepare all system quotes for customers including the hardware, software and estimated development costs.
The founders of SHL were Ayn Rand fans 
and one of her books, The Fountainhead, was a favorite. To save you reading that book, a central figure is an architect with a pure design ethic who eventually blows up a building he designed because the builder added "ugly" balconies.
It was inevitable that my job title eventually became "Computer Systems Architect" and while some of the systems I architected eventually blew up, it was always attributed to poor programming... SHL went on to become over 3,000 consultants strong and was eventually sold out to Ross Perot's old company where they have now become an accounting footnote ($1.6 billion).
Mapping Antarctica.
The first system we built at SHL was an online map editing system (Automap) for the Australian Army - who are responsible for mapping that continent. It worked so well that the Australian Navy then ordered a special version for themselves. We had to make two major changes:
- instead of altitudes in the old system, they had to be turned into negative numbers for depths on navigation charts.
- we had to add a Latimer map projection for the navy to chart Antarctica.
With the break up of a huge ice mass in the Antarctic, I bet the Australian navy is busily blasting through those old charts and revising the size of the Antarctic continent. Isn't global warming fun?
The 8k system
The first computer I ever programmed was in programming school in 1969. It was a Univac 9200 with 8k (that's right, 8,000 characters) of memory. There was no disk, no magnetic tape, just punched cards and an operating system that was called "BCS" for Basic Card Support. Thankfully it had the same hardware instruction set as the first IBM 360 computers coming down the pipe. There was a printer, card reader, card punch and a hexadecimal light display. Since there was so little memory, error messages were always displayed as hexadecimal light displays.
Another 8k system
I worked for a number of years programming DEC computers. The pre-VAX/pre-VMS operating systems were a little primitive but pretty effective. My favorite was the RSX operating system which had been written originally as an 8k real-time multi-user operating system! and it worked just fine, thank you... Bill Gates, eat your heart out.
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