Pre-Internet White Collar Workers

I started in newspapers at the tail end of the dying, hot press generation. We would write copy on typewriters, hand it to speedier typists who used an odd machine that looked like it came from the 1700s, and it would turn into a printing press-able layout thanks to melted lead typeset letters that would cool, but still be used hot. Hence, "hot of the press."

This quickly turned into a somewhat computerized system, Compugraphic Unisetter to be precise, but again, we'd type on one machine, hand copy over to someone else, who would type it on a weird system WITH NO MONITOR. They'd type blind, the machine making an odd "plunk" sound with every key pressed. Again, weird magic, but also again, a big separation between systems. Nothing worked with anything else, unless you were at some huge operation. ROI was impossible.

Then we got Macintosh computers that would do layout direct to laserprinters, and a digital camera that shot like the so-called potato, but could take, and put an image on a layout in 20 minutes. You've no idea.

Not using my real handle here, but my first job out of college was doing field research on wolves. Didn't use a computer much until I was finishing my masters degree in the mid-1980s. Did stats (BMDP) on a campus mainframe and bought my first PC for the writing. It was really slow. Used a monochrome monitor until about 1992 or 1993. Saw first examples of instant messaging in about 1989 and started using e-mail in about 1991.

I think it was easier to focus on your work back then. You still had to go to the library and do literature searches the hard way, looking in card catalogs for books or scouring stacks of journals on the mostly deserted 4th floor. I actually enjoyed that, except maybe running the copy machine. But that wasn't terrible, just a bit boring. In the early 90s it was kind of a transition period. The campuses would have departmental computer rooms and either you walked in or signed up for computer time for personal email. I had a computer account for work, and could do word processing, stats, and work email through that.

Things changed quickly in about 1995, when the www opened up. We still used modems and faxes and everything was slower. Graphics and pictures took forever to load up and often you would not get anything. Streaming wasn't widespread until the early or mid 2000s, and even then it was spotty.

Technology has gotten better but it's been all downhill with the advent of social media platforms and smart phones over the past 10-15 years. I like the convenience of many things, but is life any better? We are more isolated and hate each other more now.

It was nice. I miss it.

The sound of real typewriters. The smell of them. We have been watching a netflix series set in the 70s and i can literally smell the typewriters, white out, oil, etc of the offices as i watch it.

Long lunches with multiple drinks.

Work from 9-5 and no expectation that you were going to work at home tonight.

i don't miss the smoking in the office. That was just gross.

No cubes.

True Story - I was a Kelly Girl (a temp, i'm a guy btw) in high school. One day in the summer i went to a new firm (i later found out was a Medicare scam). Around lunch i look over to the boss who pulls a line of coke, in the office, and says to 16 year old me, "want some?" I said no. I'm good. He did buy me a beer at lunch.

Good times....

OMG - that's the funnies post I've read in awhile ... thank you! nice titties Tammie !!

Dinosaur here. I graduated college in the mid-90s and started working for the government. Our division had one DOS computer (I don't even remember what it was used for) and we had to look at old files on microfiche. Three of us shared one telephone. If we needed to write a letter we had to hand write it and bring it to the word processors who then used an electric typewriter to make it official. If we needed to write a permit we had hard copy forms that we personalized with the name of the facility, then selected which standard terms we wanted in the permit by circling a letter (A, B, etc.) to correlate with which terms applied to the facility. If we wanted to add more specialized terms and conditions we either wrote them by hand or found a similar permit, photocopied the terms and taped them to a piece of paper with the hand written notes. The word processors would type those up for us too.

It was such a simpler time and much more enjoyable and relaxed work environment. We got computers a couple of years later which helped to streamline things. As technology advanced, so did the expectations. Everything became about numbers - how many permits can we crank out in the shortest amount of time. They cared about quantity over quality, knowing it would cause us more work later on to correct it. The bean counters didn't care because permit modifications weren't on any sort of time clock. We went from issuing short, to-the-point permits to issuing small novels and expecting facilities to have the time and expertise to navigate all of the complicated language to find their requirements. Sometimes we didn't even understand the language. I ended up leaving because morale went in the gutter.

Thinking back though, when the internet first became a "thing" I didn't even understand what it was. I remember a guy at work showing me the browser - I think it was called WebCrawler or something like that. He tried explaining that it can be used to look things up. I asked, "What things?" He said, "Anything." I couldn't comprehend what he meant. It took me a couple years to finally use the internet and understand what it was all about. Now my (different branch of government) job depends on it and comes to a screeching halt when computers are down.

And yes, everyone smoked, there were mountains of coke, the guys in the back were literally selling weed off the production dock.

I was at an importer-exporter right when the WWW became a thing. We went from downloading Mosaic nightly hoping for new innovations, to local criminal operations going worldwide within the year.

The WWW boomed because of gambling, pron, and crime. It's still there, obviously, but before the feds had a handle on it, it was crazy!

My only pre-internet employment was a temp job at Wells Fargo's mutual fund processing center. I spent all day inputting trade tickets into a DOS based program. I got to be pretty fast on the ten key.

People would just sit around and talk to each other across their cubicles all day. They had been doing data entry for so long that they could work and carry on a conversation at the same time.

The biggest innovation of all, in my lifetime?

The answering machine I got, in maybe 1989, which allowed me to call from any other phone, and get my messages.

But then my employer gave me a fax machine. That was awesome until I figured out he'd fax me work when I was at home. The newspaper employment section was full of ads saying "free laptop." It's a trick!

mystapler wrote:

Just watch Office Space.

Which is funny since he worked updating miles of code for make sure software was Y2K compliant.

Meanwhile, just today, in fact, we are (finally) switching from copper phone lines to VOIP.

As I type, our phone system is still copper, but we're fiber "to the street," and everything is working. Another transition. The past 30-40 years or so have been wild, actually.

Runner10287 wrote:

mystapler wrote:

Just watch Office Space.

Which is funny since he worked updating miles of code for make sure software was Y2K compliant.

I worked in an environment just out of college just like Office Space around the time the film came out. Gray cubicles, in an office park, big chunky Dell computers, and even shared a cubicle my first year like Samir and Michael did.

To be honest, it wasn't that bad. Pay was $40K which was good for 2000. It was always quiet, and I worked with a lot of guys in their 40's to 60's, who spoke a lot of the early days of coding and had all the introverted characteristics that programmers have.

One thing I will say is that time felt like it really slowed down in that environment. 8am to 2pm was an eternity and the last 3 hours just absolutely dragged. I kind of get a little depressed thinking back how I should a have worked in a more "start up" environment with ping pong tables and bean bag chairs - but I hear that those environments can be toxic.

if you had a fast-paced job in banking or law, you'd have to call into your work voicemail from a payphone regularly if you were out and about on a weekend to see if something came up that meant you had to go into the office

I started working in sales for one of the big "3-letter" computer companies in 1983 (recently retired).

The amount of wasted paper for product updates, intra and inter-company communication was insane. Secretaries and administration personnel performed a ton of non-direct sales activity for us, including preparing our expense reports and "mailing" them via the postal service.

Contrasting the above time to the environment from which I retired (sales management with a Fortune 50 company) is like night and day.

Having spent 36 years in computer and networking sales and engineering, I'm very tech proficient and I see the streamlining of corporate America continuing to the point of workers becoming almost totally autonomous via the tech tools at hand. Good bye mid-level management positions.

Ackley wrote:

Fax and coffee wrote:

Fun times.

I loved the fax machine. You could send sketches to your engineer in Malaysia.

And he would send a fax back.

For the youngsters here. This is how a fax machine works:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apQMhA_4xik

Does anyone remember being on the receiving end of a fax machine calling your phone number?

That guy forget to say to face the paper in the popper direction so the receiver doesn't get blank pages.

Here is Elaine from Seinfeld getting fax calls to her home number:

I was a senior in college when Office Space came out. Some classmates and I watched the movie and thought, "No way that'll happen to us!" We had no idea.

My first post-college job felt like I was living in that movie. The shared cubicles, the constantly broken copy machine, the eight different bosses, the annoying receptionist, the paranoid old guy, it had it all (minus getting to date Jennifer Aniston and ripping off the company for lots of money; I missed out on those parts). One day, I kid you not, an all employees email went out announcing that the next Friday was Hawaiian shirt day. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

Thankfully, my subsequent jobs got better, but yeah, work will always suck. That's why they have to pay you to do it.

Plenty of us dinosaurs around. Work was not any less hectic. There were phones, beepers, inter-office mail, secretaries, and, of course, your boss would come to your office (or desk) and ask you to do something. You took your work home in a briefcase.

Some of us (mostly tech people) had email, crude chat, and internet before everyone else. The internet consisted of e-mail (outside your company even), gopher, ftp, telnet, usenet. Browsers did not come out until the early-mid 90's, but there was not a lot of content for a while.

I was able to dial into work and do work from home in the early 90's - using my home computer as a dumb terminal into my (or a shared) unix workstation. But that was for after hours, weekends, or when too sick to go into the office, but not sick enough to do nothing.

I had a few jobs before my life as a coder, but those were mostly labor jobs. I worked in "office maintenance" for a year or two while going to night school. I had a shared office. A shared phone. A shared van. My very own beeper. We moved offices (furniture and all), hung whiteboards, painted office, fixed desks, took files to storage, sometimes reconfigured office spaces - tearing down walls and putting up new ones.

That was still busy and hectic at times, but not in the same way you'd consider a job today hectic. I was busy getting tasks done, not busy being bombarded with tasks every few minutes.

good get on copying pages from books. especially in my summer government desk jobs I had plenty of time to ponder "if nobody does this job except in summer, how important can it be?" while trying to look occupied. Learned to make the occasional task [type this letter for....] take a while.

Anybody who has a make-work job these days and can amuse themselves by checking the internet on a smartphone does not know how tough we had it! it built character, not to mention boredom tolerance

For me, working in advertising, it was just like Madmen.

Men were men, and women were women. Noone was offended by off color/sexist remarks and innocent flirting.

Everything was done by hand. No computers. Just typewriters and drawing tables.

Best of times. Very cool.

The internet ruined everything.

graduated from college in '84; got entry level job since I had a minor in "Computer Applications" and ended up having the 1st PC at our company.

My main task was to take printouts from the mainframe dudes and re-enter the stuff into Lotus 1-2-3 (or Visicalc) and do basic analysis of "white collar productivity" e.g., average number of claims processed/closed by person, yada yada.

Great times...