A little history of BayWa IT
Typewriters, confetti and the very first e-mail: The beginnings of BayWa IT
"Anyone who works in IT has their finger on the pulse of the times - and that's no resting pulse," says Morena Gärtner. She speaks from her own experience: the current IT training coordinator experienced digitalisation at BayWa from the very beginning, when typewriters still dominated the office scene and the term digitalisation was not yet part of our vocabulary.
Bulky devices where today there are slim laptops
In the 1970s, a black giant moved into BayWa's computer centre: the IBM 1288 page reader. "Colleague Computer" was how the "Schwalbe", the former BayWa employee magazine, introduced the device. The picture above is from a 1970 issue.
On 1 September 1979, Morena Gärtner begins her training as an office clerk. She is 15 years old and has an incredible amount of fun with the booking and invoicing machine.
Morena still remembers the IBM PCs. They are clunky, the screens resemble tube televisions. To prevent them from overheating, they need a lot of space for air circulation. It's difficult to even find tables for them. And then there are the space-consuming dot matrix printers, which have their own soundproofing because of the incredible noise.
Confetti everywhere - unfortunately in yellow and not suitable for carnival
At the beginning of the 1980s, Morena was responsible for commercial and organisational activities in the spare parts centre for agricultural machinery. She places orders by teleprinter.
The huge box, which resembles a typewriter, transmits the information using punched tape. These are strips of paper ten to twelve metres long with small holes punched in them. Similar to fax machines, the sender dials the recipient. The recipient's device translates the perforated code back into a normal document.
It's hard to imagine today: back then, there were tonnes of paper in the archives, and in the offices, punching the perforated strips created endless amounts of confetti. "Unfortunately in yellow and therefore not suitable for carnival," recalls Morena Gärtner.
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Typewriters, teleprinters and finally the first PCs: new technologies were added every decade.
@baywa.de: The very first e-mail
In the 1990s, the Internet was still in its infancy and there were only a limited number of e-mail addresses. Morena's first e-mail was sent to Deutsche Telekom. Her own e-mail address ends in @baywa.de in the sender's address - and this is still the case today.
At this point, Morena was already working in the department that we now call IT. But neither IT nor digitalisation were part of the vocabulary back then. Instead, it was called electronic data processing, better known by the abbreviation EDP.
"Anyone who works in IT has their finger on the pulse - and that's not a resting pulse"
Today, around 400 people work in BayWa IT, equipped with state-of-the-art technology and the latest operating system. Every process is programmed and tested by colleagues in the background.
Naturally, they pass on their knowledge, like Morena Gärtner: as IT training coordinator, she supervises trainees and dual students. As she herself has enjoyed her tech job for 30 years and is aware of the low proportion of women in the IT sector, she wants to inspire women in particular.