Pre-Internet White Collar Workers

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.)

I worked in an office before the internet, but I still did all of my work on a computer. There were word processing programs, spreadsheets and graphics programs. I also did a lot of work connected remotely to a mainframe. A lot of data was stored on 9-track tapes. This was in the 1980s so I can't speak of what is was like in a typical office before that.

In the 1970s before PCs I used punch cards in grad school. And there were these places called libraries.

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.)

So I had this phone at my desk that would only dial within the company. I think it may have been rotary, but I can’t remember. We had a touch tone phone at home, and I’d record the tones to dial friends “long distance” and remarkably this worked on my desk phone. Nobody ever complained about the charges I was racking up. There were all kinds of ways to waste time before the internet.

Things were so different then, you could drink at lunch, lunch was an easy hour, you could say "nice titties Tammy" she'd say thank you, some smoked inside which was horrible, you could leave early to coach, if two guys had an issue you'd take it out back, good times indeed !

We had secretaries and receptionists, keypunch data entry clerks, and ou mainframes communicated via modems on BSC, SNA, X.25, Decnet, Appletalk. The Internet came about in the office around 1990. Webbrowsing, Videocamera Phones around 1995 in Japan only, the US didn't have any back then.

Now, you can scan a document and attach it to an email. In the 80s, the fastest method was next day with FedEx. Every day we would have several documents for the last run and sometimes one of our guys would be chasing after them in a car.

Later. FedEx introduced "Zap it" which was just them having a fax machine and one document might have cost $50. Soon after that, offices could buy their own machines. They used thermal paper and after a few years in the files, the print would dissappear.

Electric typewriters were a big thing for quite a while.

Near the end, after the invention of white-out, there were electric typewriters that had white-out ribbons where you could go back and erase stuff.

OldTimerfromMemphis wrote:

Things were so different then, you could drink at lunch, lunch was an easy hour, you could say "nice titties Tammy" she'd say thank you, some smoked inside which was horrible, you could leave early to coach, if two guys had an issue you'd take it out back, good times indeed !

that sounds wonderful

OK, one anecdote, one opinion:

Before the Internet, first thing in the morning, British time, Goldman Sachs’s (I think it was) London office would grab the Financial Times, clip all relevant articles, photocopy and fax them to the New York office. This meant that someone in the GS New York office could start trading on the After-Hours Market at about 4 am New York time, with privileged information. Information from the British markets that no one else had in the US.

Now, to tell you youngsters how it was before the Internet, before PCs even. If you wanted to find out something simple, like “What are the 10 highest mountains in the world?” you might have the Encyclopedia Britannica at home so it would take only a few minutes. But if not, you would trudge down to your local library and ask at the front desk “Where would I find this information?” The librarian would tell you “That would be in the reference section. Walk down this aisle and at the end, you’ll see a staircase. Go up one floor, then turn to your right and walk all the way down. You’ll see the reference librarian there.”

Off you go, and five minutes later the reference librarian says “I think that would be in the World Almanac, but I’ll have to check.”

Another five minutes and she says: “Yes, here it is. Right here on page 177.”

You want to rip the page out of the almanac, but she tells you “You can photocopy this page down in the Copy section. First you have to go to the Billing Department and pre-pay. The cost is 5 cents per page. Then you take your receipt to Photocopying and they will do it for you. If there’s no line, the whole process is really quick – maybe 20 minutes.”

I calculate I am at least 10 times more productive with the Internet and a computer than I was with analogue and a typewriter.

Some good anecdotes here.

Did an internship in the late 90’s, right before web browsing became prevalent in work places. I would typically finish all my work by 10am and then just kind of zone out (yes, like Office Space) for 90 minutes until lunch. Off to a 1.5 hour lunch where I’d typically try to sleep in my car. Back by 1 where I would then try to look busy for the remaining 4 hours. Talk to the women in accounting, walk the floor, use the bathroom. Having a book to read would have been a lifesaver, but that was frowned upon. I later learned to photocopy pages from a book and insert them in my work binder, so it looked like I was reading materials for work. Expectations was that I was at my desk at all times other than lunch in case someone “needed me”, which rarely was the case. I was just happy to be getting paid and have something to add to my resume. I’m hindsight, should have offered to do more, but really not sure they had anything for me that couldn’t be done in 2 hours.

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

I started work a few years before the Internet really started coming into offices. We had early computers, sometimes with Windows (3.0), but often still running DOS 6.2 or similar.

A lot of organizations that needed data had an onsite library. Sometimes even a librarian. I worked in a small engineering firm in the early 1990s right when more tech was coming online. We had a fairly large print library that we could go to if we needed information. We used a very primitive BBS system with several modems to send files between offices. It took forever.

Law firms had databases that they could subscribe to....lexxus nexxus or something like that. Very slow and not graphical. If you knew the language of how to query such databases you could make good money because often lawyers didn't learn this stuff. So you had paid researchers who could do this work for you.

Word processing early on was all done with Word Perfect, 5.0 became the standard in the early 1990s. No GUI. You could memorize keystrokes to perform things or have a small template on your keyboard. So to bold something you might press Shift-Alt-B or something like that. Again, people who knew this program could be in demand.

I think office workers got to know each other a lot better because you had to do a lot of stuff in person, over the phone. E-mail was just starting to show up. We used Lotus Notes at one job and that became our internal e-mail system. At some point it was connected to the Internet, but maybe not until 1995 or so.

Universities had more connectivity. I was "online" in 1989 with e-mail that could go across university networks. We used usenet to talk about stuff we liked, a system of text-based message boards, basically, organized in a hierarchy. rec.running may have been quite popular.

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?

Just watch Office Space.

Ha! I love to tell this to our, even not so young, software developers. (Because I'm old and that's what we do!)

I started working as a programmer in the late '70s.

Each day I would sit at my desk with a coding pad and a pencil, literally "writing" code. When the program was ready to test, I would sign up for time on one of our office's 2 keypunch machines.

When my reserved time arrived I would go to the keypunch area and punch out a deck of cards containing my program code, then take my compile JCL deck from my desk drawer and insert the cards containing my program code into the appropriate place in that deck. I would then walk down the hall to the I/O desk and turn in my card deck. On a set schedule, the Operations group would retrieve the waiting decks from the I/O office, take them to the computer room, and feed them into the card reader.

Eventually, the computer would process the job and print out the results of the compile, indicating the line(s) of code with compile errors, if any. If there were errors, you take the listing back to your desk, fix the code, reserve keypunch time, etc. If the compile was successful, the program would execute and your print out would contain the output results. Occasionally, the Operations team would deliver all of the completed job decks back to the I/O office. You never knew when your job results would be available, so you just walked down and checked with I/O from time to time. Often you would not receive your compile results on the same day it was submitted because you were competing for computer time with production jobs and all of the other programmers' jobs.

If I didn't know how to do something, I went and grabbed the manual (aka. book) from the common set (if someone else didn't already take it), took it back to my desk, and started reading.

Also, probably at least half of your co-workers smoked at their desks, which were all in an open room.

Good times!

We were allowed one lump of coal per week to warm our hands and to keep the ink in the inkwell from freezing while writing in our ledgers with quill pens. Hard to see our work clearly by candlelight, but we did the best we could. Regular beatings by the tyrannical office boss for tardiness or insolence. Occasional vicarious thrill when one of the city trollops walked by outside and flashed a hint of bloomers. We were lucky to get Christmas day off. Sadness for the plight of humanity mixed with the stench of offal coming off the river fueled our ambitions to start inventing phones, faxes, indoor plumbing and stuff.

Forgot to mention...

If you ticked off the Operations folks, they might accidentally drop your deck, also known as a "floor sort", and you had to reassemble the deck in the correct order and resubmit. :)

first boomerposting thread on letsrun that i've actually enjoyed

OldTimerfromMemphis wrote:

ome smoked inside which was horrible

I remember this in the 80's. We had two really pretty girls just out of college and they would blow smoke rings across the room and try to hit eachother while sitting at their desks. It's funny that we didn't mind this back then, but as soon as the smoking ban happened we all wondered why this went on for so long.

In the 90s it was Microfiche, Gopher and WAIS. Usenet was a blast.

Graphics.....I worked for a major film distribution company and I remember looking at movie posters designed and drawn by hand by commercial artists and being stunned. Photography all on film, with scanners used to get the negatives on computers. Adobe Pagemaker and QuarkXpress were used for lettering on the posters once the artist delivered his/her work.

I used to spend a lot of time fingering my Wang:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuX-6761KTQ