Today I am getting many congratulations on LinkedIn from friends. It is 32 years ago I got started in what we today call IT. Here is what I wrote back to them:
Thanks everyone. It has been and continues to be such a great exciting journey. I remember back to the days of single sided and double sided 5.25″ and 8″ floppy disks. Osborne portables with 5″ 52 character line displays, LNW and Chameleon computers. Multiplan, WordStar, Electric Pencil, Lotus 1-2-3, MS DOS, CP/M, Z80s, M68000s and 8088s. Getting Pong like graphics on an $800 CGA monitor was wowing.
What do you remember from your early years in IT? Please share it here.
Smoke testing is a term used to describe the testing process for servers after patches are applied. 
Estimating an average time for patching servers and PCs can be a bit tricky. It can vary from one month to the next, depending upon the number and complexity of the patches released by your software vendors. You must consider all versions of operating systems and have a complete inventory of all your application software to do this job correctly. Our experience has shown that manual patching of systems takes on average of about 1.5 hours each.
This is a basic cost calculator for you to compute your typical monthly cost for patching your servers, PCs, laptops, tablets and associated application software. It also forms the basis for you to begin calculating your Return on Investment for software patching, or for comparison with alternatives to the manual process of patching operating systems and application software—such as Patch Management as a Service, also known as Vulnerability Management as a Service.