[cafard]

I think that anyone not in a law firm or financial services would find it hard to remember those days.

An acquaintance, probably 70 by now, worked in IBM sales when he was first out of the Navy. He said that a fellow salesman shocked the office by coming to work in a blue rather than white shirt. (He didn't mention any deaths from the shock, so I assume the guy still had suit and tie.) And Gerald Weinberg has written of a slightly earlier period that at IBM you demonstrated that you were a genius by growing a beard and not getting fired.

I did once work for a place where men where expected to wear ties when going to customer sites. (You might also have squeeze in behind a refrigerator-sized minicomputers.) My boss grumbled a bit when one of our better techs skipped the tie on the grounds of limited range of motion, having recently had shoulder surgery. But there were no consequences.

Oh, and from the truly distant past: I worked with a man whose father-in-law had worked at FBI headquarters. The older man told of J. Edgar Hoover one day stopping in the hall, looking over at an agent in an unusually-colored suit (I think green) and say "That's an odd-colored suit for an agent to wear.) The guy was gone from headquarters the next day, I suppose shipped to Butte, Montana.