Pre-Internet White Collar Workers

I worked for a engineering consulting firm in the early 80s. You wrote a memo longhand one of the secretaries would type it up on a IBM Selectric typewriter or if it was a wide distribution it would go to the Wang Word processing center. My boss at the time told me you never know who is going to see that memo after it is distributed so make sure it is professional, advice I followed into email. I once had a project concerning a complex water resource calculations so I hoofed over to the university library to do a literature search, We had access to an IBM mainframe so I would write up my program on coding sheets and send it off to the keypunch department and send it by courier to the mainframe center. The greatest invention of all time was the invention of interactive terminals that enabled on-line editing and submission of programs. The only thing I miss from those days was that the slowness of tools forced you to be more deliberate and thoughtful about your communications.

Wade Garrett wrote:

I once had to show a new hire how to use a landline at her desk. There wasn't really anything to learn, but she confided that she had a lot of anxiety about using the phone. She said she never did that in her personal life and had never used a phone "that's attached to something."

I have two employees who are both 23 years old. I told one of them to send an e-mail to someone asked her to CC me. She gave me a really blank look. I said something like "you know, carbon copy" and then realized the idea of carbons, which I only vaguely remember (I'm 50) would be completely unknown to her. Explained the concept and realized how old I felt.

Before the mide-80's point and shoot, auto-focus, motor drive, computerized cameras we had to know how to make great pictures by using human talents.

Since the mid-80s millions of people can take great pictures from automation and computers.

We used to develop B&W film on location in the toilet then FAX it via modem to transmit.

If we made 5 great pics in a day we were the G.O.A.T., a legend back home at our newspaper office.

In 2021 any one can make 100,000 great pictures in one day.

my anecdote [undergrad early 90s, first job mid 90s]

first real job: at a tech company, making software, kinda like BBS stuff/community, maybe like a combo

realtor.com/nextdoor

that never really went anywhere but the founders sold for a few million I guess they did alright. I got paid like $25/hr to code ajax and stupid webforms.

bad example

nextjob

at a bank , brick/mortar, that sort of thing. IT dept, legacy mainframe, ancient windows versions at the desktop, and various apps to maintain [wed call this devops today]

all the bank employees are always sending 'interoffice mail' which is an actual envelope. You put your coworkers name/branch location on it and some jackass literally drives it to the mailslot of your coworker which could be across town or like an hour away depending on the office. lol. When time wasnt of the essence they'd just snail mail it.

We had an email system of sorts, but mostly only the IT/dev team used it. We had 56k connections/basic internet but mostly it was all about access to the mainframe [accounts/posts/ACH/bank transactional stuff]

It was a pretty wild mix of what most everyone would recognize today [MS office apps], weird thinclient terminal bank stuff, and odd protocols, like pre TCP/IP stuff. Proprietary networking weirdness like appletalk, novell netware/IPX, MS LANMAN stuff, and all the bank stuff which I cant really remember.

Anyways just sharing. It was completely wild to me because I was a tech worker and lived in say Unix/PINE/FTP/Gopher and all that and it felt like I jumped into the 50s or something when I worked at the bank.

I only stayed like a year but they were making progress but I'm sure people still found excuses to use the inter-office mail thing.

$hit I work in a Fortune-50 and we still have a mail slot and a method to send inter-office mail. Damn if I have any idea how to do it. I look like once every couple months at my mail slot and throw everything out thats in there. Doing my part

State Unemployment Offices in my state still uses those old 1950s/1960s ATT Bell and Motorola CODEX modems that are hardwired and can't be upgraded. You have to solder jumpers, or hand configure jumpers in the board to customized it to the copper twister pair phone line, No uploadable firmware, no Hayes command dumb terminal interface. The State still uses COBOL on IBM mainframes with refrigerator sized serial communications controllers. No wonder people haven't received their checked yet ;-)

I worked for a defense contractor in the mod 1980’s. It was as free wheeling as some said.

* 1 beer at lunch was ok, but more was a no-no.

* 1 guy would smoke in the office.,people complained to each other, but noone tried to stop it.

* sex harassment was just becoming an issue. We were told not to ask a woman “how was your weekend?”, because it could be interpreted as a question regarding their sex life.

* the older engineers could work a PC, but I had to teach them how to use a Mac. Their excitement of using a mouse dwindled, when they realized the Macs couldn’t run their Fortran programs.

* strip bars were discreetly attended.,I have my last $1 to a stripper, an then had to walk home, because I didn’t have a $1 for the subway.

* most communication consisted of internal mail - placing an envelope in an out box, that would be hand delivered in 1-2 days

* long distance phone calls were expensive, so personal ones were discouraged. A manager would sometimes give us the phone bill to mark our calls, and 1 girl was deeply criticized for spending 30 minutes talking to her boyfriend in Denver.

* we hand marked up old test reports with the latest testing data for the secretary to type up, similar to what I do today.

* a program came out to record on a computer your time spent on each job. Many thought it was an illegal way of having a time card

* we had debates about how it was more than 15 years since someone walked on the moon, and whether it was worth going back, since all we got was Tang

* we also asked the older engineers what it was like not having an ATM, and they would tell us it was crazy at the banks on Friday

I meant to say “not as Free wheeling” as some said.

Calendars with bikini clad woman were banned. No one was openly having or demanding sex in the office. Things were becoming PC. Someone made me take down my presidential election comparison poster between George Bush and Mike dekaucus . Someone was scolded for saying all the real men wanter Bush, and the gays wanted decaucus. We were hoping that PC would be a passing fad, but try today debating on Facebook that Chauvin should have only been charged with manslaughter

I'll never forgive the Media and Nixon for dragging the Vietnam war defeat along for years and years after the 1968 Tet debacle. Another 150,000 Americans died in Vietnam and after being discharged from their wounds for a total of 250,000 dead Americans.

It was awesome. Faxes, calls, snail mail took way longer so projects weren't nearly as hectic. Since lots of communication relied on staffing and services there were no expectations for staying late, over time, etc. You got paid way more for way less work. I'd go as far as to say the modern workday is practically slavery in comparison.

DeTron Lames wrote:

Wade Garrett wrote:

I once had to show a new hire how to use a landline at her desk. There wasn't really anything to learn, but she confided that she had a lot of anxiety about using the phone. She said she never did that in her personal life and had never used a phone "that's attached to something."

I have two employees who are both 23 years old. I told one of them to send an e-mail to someone asked her to CC me. She gave me a really blank look. I said something like "you know, carbon copy" and then realized the idea of carbons, which I only vaguely remember (I'm 50) would be completely unknown to her. Explained the concept and realized how old I felt.

My father, who briefly worked as a typist for the Southern Pacific Railroad in the late 1950s, said that he had to hit the typewriter keys as hard as he could to make sure the text could be read through the several sheets of carbon paper he was typing through. He said his forearms would be absolutely exhausted at the end of a workday.

wow, Windows 3.0 lol. really took me down memory lane.

on that note, any chance the brojos could start running some del *.* on certain letsrunners and their ridiculous posts?

My first real gig we were actually using OS/2, which IBM positioned as an alternative to WIndows. It ran on their PS/2 computers. I think Microsoft was a partner in development, and then they split. This was around 1990, maybe? The boss liked IBM stuff, so we were also running a token ring network, which I think ran at 4 Mbps. Later it reached 16 MBps.

A lot of what we were doing was still on original IBM PC hardware, I used to pull boards out of them and sometimes even strip chips and fix stuff that way. Skills I learned that would never help me down the road. At some point we got hard drives, Winchester drives, they were ten or twenty meg. They fit in the same bay height as the old 5.25 floppy, iirc.

In the late 80s/very early 90s I remember my father, who worked in R&D for an automotive company, bringing his 'laptop' home.

I could barely lift it, and it came inside what looked like a large beige plastic briefcase. No windows - DOS prompt only. I remember playing a game called Mars Attacks on it, but I've no idea what my dad actually used it for. Just a status symbol I think.

When I started out of a newspaper reporter, I used this:

https://img.money.com/2014/09/140911_inv_radioshack.jpg

In my next job as a writer and editor for a magazine publisher, I used this:

https://mercari-images.global.ssl.fastly.net/photos/m77335878796_1.jpg?1592044132

I didn't work for a company that had internet access until 1995, and at that company we were forbidden from using it for anything other than work purposes (this was strictly monitored and enforced).

Flagpole wrote:

When I started out of a newspaper reporter, I used this:

https://img.money.com/2014/09/140911_inv_radioshack.jpg

In my next job as a writer and editor for a magazine publisher, I used this:

https://mercari-images.global.ssl.fastly.net/photos/m77335878796_1.jpg?1592044132

I didn't work for a company that had internet access until 1995, and at that company we were forbidden from using it for anything other than work purposes (this was strictly monitored and enforced).

I used that EXACT same 'laptop' when I'd go to the police department to record violations that I might not have heard about otherwise. I'd go back to the office, scroll through what I'd typed, and input into a Mac like that. (A few years earlier I did the same with an even more ancient 'word processor,' and a Tandy TRS-80 machine that output to huge floppy disks.)

But I set up an AppleTalk network for the Macs, and my copy would find its way to our Power Computing machines.

I still have a pile of 80s computers, and it's amazing how fast they actually were. When you don't have a browser open with 37 tabs, and aren't streaming loads of stuff, they actually run.

Flagpole, I wonder if you worked in a Rocky Mountain state newspaper office?

hiya pal wrote:

Any of you "dinosaurs" around? What was office life like before the internet? I have to imagine the pace was less hectic, but perhaps I'm wrong. I often think about how much better it must've been when you didn't have to worry about constant email, etc. I'm sure there were downsides too since technology does provide some advantages. I also wonder how it would feel to sit behind a desk and have just a pencil and papers in front of me, as opposed to basically all of human knowledge at your finger tips (which isn't necessarily always a good thing.)

It was just a sh*t ton of paperwork and phone calls. Think, every time you now go online, replace it with either a phone call or getting/making/mailing paperwork. Just a crap ton of inefficiency and really boring in-between times, that we now fill with going down internet rabbit holes.

I still remember the first email I received. It seemed like magic. Sounds funny to say now, but it really did.

gregmacd wrote:

No one was openly having or demanding sex in the office.

When or why, outside boomer fantasyland, would this ever have been a thing?

We used to use IBM Mainframes and BSC phone lines in the 1960s to network EBCIDIC coded terminals. After 1969 when Rand Corp of Santa Monica and UCLA invented the internet it took another 10 years to be integrated into UNIX distributions and adopted worldwide by universities and research labs. By the mid-80s businesses started using the Internet on mini-computers. Late 80's we started to see several Japanese cell phone networks with smart phone apps, limited browsers and web cams. 30 years later, today Linux now dominates IoT, phones, internet with 99% of devices installed worldwide.

I started as an attorney in San Francisco in 1976. Every law office had hard bound copies of the California appellate decisions going back to the founding of the state in 1850. When a partner needed an answer to a question it meant researching through hard bound volumes and handwriting a response which was given to a secretary to type on an electric typewriter. If changes were needed the document needed to be retyped from scratch. When one of the partners (who had family money) got a phone for his car it was a big deal. He got pulled over by a cop and immediately phoned the SF district attorney, got the DA on the phone, handed the phone to the cop and the cop walked away. When I needed to communicate something in writing to an opposing lawyer I hand wrote the letter, the secretary would type it and then put it in the mail. However, if it was urgent a messenger would be hired to bike it to the other lawyer. When you went on vacation you were on vacation. I went to Europe for three weeks and had zero contact with the office for those three weeks except for mailing a post card back to the office (which might not reach the office before I returned). As others have mentioned, no one thought anything about smoking in the office.