No liquor on election day!

Those of you above a certain age might remember when you couldn’t buy booze on election day until after the polls closed. Here’s an example, from the June 8 1977 Toronto Star:

I never really saw the point of this: you could always just buy a bunch of beverages on the previous day and then get blitzed at home on your own. (Depending on the election results, this might be a desirable thing to do.)

I couldn’t find when this stopped happening, but I’ll keep looking.

Programmer/analyst

Here’s what the world of computing looked like in the late 1970s, courtesy of the June 8, 1977 edition of the Toronto Star:

Back then, a computer was an enormous machine that was kept in a special room, and it had about as much computing power as your toaster now has.

By the way, $14,000 wasn’t a bad annual wage back then, especially for a job at which post-secondary education was not essential. Minimum wage at the time was $2.65 an hour, and when I started my first co-op programming job three years later, in the summer of 1980, I was making $190 per week.