I found this in my grandfather's tools...
 

I've been digging through all of the toolboxes I have, which count in at 43, not counting rolling cabinest, etc. In one of the ones that I got after grandpa died many years ago, I found this...

http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e1...psfeda3cc3.jpg



Two things I found interesting about it...the wages, and the fact that it is aimed specifically to men.

How old is it?

- Peter.

I have no idea...there's no date or phone number to be able to date it. The inside cover gives an address for La Salle Extension University in Chicago.

It's like a window in time. I found a pair of two handle saw blades, about 36" or so in length, wrapped in newspaper from the 1940's. The paper started flaking away when I pulled them out of the box.

I think late 50s- early 60s would be when those kinds of wages would seem attractive to interested parties.

I'm thinking closer to the 1970's...possibly the late 1960's.

A little digging showed the LSEU closed in 1982.

I would put it in the early sixties. In the mid seventies I made more than $13,000 just out of college doing digital interfacing and assembly programming to support the digital interface hardware designs.

This was on a DEC PDP8 mini computer. It was 12 bit, octal with 4k of core memory. Sounds like nothing now, but we did some impressive real time stuff with it.

I tend to agree with jp on this one, most people didn't even know what a computer even was until the late 70's. :)

Mumbai India last week would have been my guess if you had not mentioned where you found it.

Pretty cool - and amazing that your grandad had so many tool boxes.

A friend of mine worked at a match factory in the late 60's. He was eat up with matchbook tech.

This book has a regular striker which were outlawed sometime in the mid 70's. If the striker were on the back of the book it would be a 'reverse striker' and this was a high cost option.

Is there anywhere on the book that says who produced the matches? Universal, Atlas, Brown and Bigalow, and Diamond were the big companies then.

Is anything printed inside the cover? If there is a ZIP code then they were made after July 1, 1963.

One of my mentors went into business for himself back in the early seventies because his computer job wouldn't pay $5/hr. He was extremely intelligent and hard working but also a social retard.

$1/hr would get you a labor worker through the 60's. Pickup a truckload of them at the local bar anytime. In the 40's it was a $1/day.

Big money wants to pay wages to cover expenses as they were twenty years ago. I recently saw an ad for a job like I worked 25 years ago and they were offering about the same pay as I made then. It wasn't an exciting salary then.

Pay for technical workers must be based on the worker living in their parent's basement. Payment for labor workers seems to be based on living in a tent behind Walmart. And on debt, of course. Piercings, tattoos and sex seem to be the countering compensation. What people are taught to call life these days???

At one time in the 70's my dad was up to $15k a year as a computer programmer. Apparently, that was a lot at the time. After he got laid off, he went back in the Army as a programmer for Uncle Sam. He retired in '91, having been a Sergeant First Class as a programmer and systems analyst. He still gets a good retirement from it.