Remember, Miss Software Engineer recently shit-talked COBOL as being obsolete. John understands as much about computers as he does fashion.
I saw that and almost rolled my eyes out of my head. It's already been covered, but like was mentioned above, from what I've heard a good solid knowledge of COBOL will land you comfortable work.
I mentioned Wu-Mang's quote there to my wife, who worked in medical in the military back then and she stared laughing. Most of the clinics had computers.
What John doesn't realize is computers were pretty goddamn specific back then, IBM still had a lock on the patents, and they needed to be EMP shielded (at least in my field) so they'd still be useful during a conflict.
And the fact that she thinks that the female heavy jobs like clerk were unimportant, it shows how blindingly STUPID she is about the military. One piece of paperwork wrong could fuck up massive amounts of shit. Anyone who's been in can give you horror stories about a single piece of paperwork grinding shit to a halt.
And even infantrymen thought computers were kinda interesting. The dude who ran the onpost pirating ring was a fucking Ranger of all things. Jesus, even brain damaged ballsweat huffing snake eaters were starting to notice computers could do interesting things. Artillery units had them, the simulaters were becoming more common (Hell, by 87 you could go up to the airfield and sign up to spend an hour learning how to fly one in a simulator if you knew the right people), the Army was offering typing classes (Worth 3 promotion points, boys!), computers were becoming more and more common to do important things like height/weight body fat computations, APFT aggregates, promotion point spreads.
Brianna is, again, talking out his ass about things he knows nothing about.
Edit: The more I think about this, the madder I get. For fuck's sake, he's running for goddamn CONGRESS, which means committees and shit that deal with the military. If he was a tech specialist like he claims he'd know all about how vital the military was to keeping the early computer industry afloat and, like NASA, pushing the envelope on miniturization, cooling, speed. How, by 1991, computers were everywhere to the point that DAT (Dumb Ass Tanker) was renamed C-DAT (Computerized Dumb Ass Tanker) by pretty much everyone I knew. Jesus, the Titan/Atlas/Minuteman sites had shitloads of computers. When computer prices dropped massively in the early 1990s, the DoD let Divisions and Brigades buy computers from like Dell and Dell practically filled a swimmingpool with jizz at all the computer orders. Someone who could maintain computers and networks suddenly found themselves being treated like a minor god (and called at 2AM to fix the goddamn network access AGAIN so that the Staff Duty could play networked Scorched Earth again).
You know who asked to learn to do that shit? The Orderly Room Clerks. Women. They knew the deal, they read the writing on the wall. A lot of CO's told guys like me "Teach the Orderly Room to install drivers, OS's, troubleshoot so you can go back to your normal job" and we did because... you know... TEAM EFFORT.
In Conclusion, John's a goddamn moron who pissed me the fuck off with that ignorant statement this morning.