What did people do in 1985?

[Caliga]

My dad used to take me into his office sometimes when I was a kid and yeah, it was pretty much Mad Men.  The only women there were all secretaries. Everyone smoked at their desk or wherever they felt like.  The main things people had on their desk were phones, oversized nameplates, and giant stacks of paper.  All the men wore suits and the women dresses.  People openly told dirty and racist jokes and everyone laughed.

[Caliga]

Also, if people wore glasses, they were ENORMOUS, like this:



and if men had facial hair, which they usually didn't, it would only ever be a moustache.

[Caliga]

Oh yeah, and the women had electric typewriters and the men wrote shit down in terrible handwriting and gave it to them to type up.

[Syt]

In the mid 90s in public administration (they were just on the cusp of providing PCs to everyone) I had to dictate letters onto tape and hand them to the typing staff.

I generally recall a lot more paper. Letters from citizens, sending files to other departments and offices, etc.

In my first job (1999) we didn't have internet or email on our PCs at first. So there was a lot more sending letters  faxes  and making phone calls. Our weekly payment run to suppliers was a 3.5" floppy disk accompanied by a signed print out of the payment overview.

[Barrister]

In the mid 90s in public administration (they were just on the cusp of providing PCs to everyone) I had to dictate letters onto tape and hand them to the typing staff.

I generally recall a lot more paper. Letters from citizens, sending files to other departments and offices, etc.

In my first job (1999) we didn't have internet or email on our PCs at first. So there was a lot more sending letters  faxes  and making phone calls. Our weekly payment run to suppliers was a 3.5" floppy disk accompanied by a signed print out of the payment overview.

No computers in 1999?

I remember in 1996 I had a work placement at AECL - Atomic Energy of Canada Limited.  Everyone there had friggin PhDs.  They were doing computer modelling of underground nuclear waste storage over millions of years.  These super geniuses had some very demanding, yet very nerdy, computer requirements - I remember a bunch of them swore by OS/2 Warp for their computers, while we also had a new server running the very new Windows NT 3.51.

What I had to work on was - a VAX/VMS workstation.  VAX/VMS was vaguely UNIX-like, but it was proprietary to DEC.  I mostly used it to take the information generated by the scientists and create pie graphs and the like to make it more user-friendly.  I'm not really sure how I even got this job as while I was an Environmental Science student, all this computer modelling was way beyond my skills.

[Syt]

No computers in 1999?

We had computers in 1999, except they were only hooked up to the internal network.

I spent two months in a small town administration during my training/studies in early 1998 (I remember because it was the Nagano Olympics). They had two single purpose computers for the two ladies working with clients in social assistance/welfare, and one for the typist of the office. They had just bought new, shiny, Win95 PCs for everyone, but they weren't set up yet (they did so in summer, IIRC). The head of the administration was very vocal about his rejection of getting one. "I've been working the past 35 years without one, I don't need one now!"

[Jacob]

In the mid 90s in public administration (they were just on the cusp of providing PCs to everyone) I had to dictate letters onto tape and hand them to the typing staff.

"Can I use your dictaphone?"

"No! Use your own dick!"

[Syt]

 

[The Larch]

I of course was way too young back then to know, but the evolution of tech in the workplace is something that I've discussed with my parents a few times.

My father (retired public servant) mostly emphasized how much the pace of work went up with the introduction of computers first and the internet afterwards. In the 80s and 90s if he was asked to write a report about something he'd be given plenty of time and ample deadlines, as he'd have to research lots of stuff the old school way, and then write the report itself and get it typed down. With technology, these deadlines became shorter and shorter, ending up in the infamous expression "this report is needed for yesterday". In his opinion the quality of reports went down precipituously because of that, as people had very little time to research and analyze the material they had to work with, and the deadlines were so short that people would just write any crap down to be able to fulfill them.

My mother (retired industrial pharmacist) stressed more the evolution of comunication technology. She worked for a multinational company with the HQ in the UK, while she worked in a facility located in rural Spain. When she joined the company in the 70s there was not even a direct phone line so all communications were by mail, and anything that had to be consulted or approved by the HQ took weeks to be done. Over time the company got a switchboard installed in the village where the factory was located, which allowed for, at the time still pretty cumbersome, but doable, international phone calls, which was a massive improvement. Now with proper planning instead of months or weeks to get something done it could go down to weeks or days (paperwork still had to be done by mail). Fax was an even more massive improvement, and apparently the engineers were absolutely giddy with the potential of being able to send back and forth diagrams of machines and production lines with their colleagues at HQ. When they finally got email that was, of course, revolutionary.

[Sheilbh]

I've had that conversation with my parents. But my dad - who was working from the 50s to the 80s only worked in the Merchant Navy and then as a woodworking/carpentry/furniture-making lecturer at an FE college. So they're quite unique experiences/perspectives and involved a lot more smoking a pipe, standing on watch etc than I could really relate to

My mum a bit more of a shift but even she only properly got going in work in the 90s in the nuclear industry by which point there were the starts of a recognisable office - although still lots of printing and paper records.

[Syt]

One thing I heard from older colleagues when I was working at a construction company, and other people - up till the 90s/00s, if you had no or little formal education you could always go and work construction or similar. Nowadays you need tons of certificates and exams to be even let near a construction job.

[Grey Fox]

One thing I heard from older colleagues when I was working at a construction company, and other people - up till the 90s/00s, if you had no or little formal education you could always go and work construction or similar. Nowadays you need tons of certificates and exams to be even let near a construction job.

And why all those gig delivery jobs are so popular.

[Josquius]

I've often thought about this myself.
I don't think I'm as ignorant of this world before computers as people just a few years younger though. I do remember when I started my senior school acorn computers were still the norm and then there was my Japanese office experience which was quite the flashback.
And when I worked in a supermarket I recall not many computers to be seen in some manager's offices. Pretty sure I recall when I worked with an industrial chemist for my week of work experience when I was 15 (enough to say 'nope') he was doing it all on paper too.
Still. I remember that Sony hack a few christmasses ago and reading of them going back to working on pen and paper and just thinking....how?

As someone for whom handwriting has always been a key academic weak point (I'm sure I probably lost a few grades over that through the years) this is one area where I'm glad to live in the 21st.

One thing I heard from older colleagues when I was working at a construction company, and other people - up till the 90s/00s, if you had no or little formal education you could always go and work construction or similar. Nowadays you need tons of certificates and exams to be even let near a construction job.

I know nothing of the setup in Austria, but this rings bells of Switzerland to me where you need qualifications for absolutely every job.
My sister for a while worked in a day care- zero qualifications for it, she's good with kids though so..whatever. Hired.
My girlfriend's mother does this for a career in Switzerland though and needs full papers for it. Everything seems so much more paperwork-centric there. When you leave a job there's even an official reference paper on a standard format you need.

[alfred russel]

A few years ago the accounting group at my company was moving floors for the first time since the 70s and we had to go through our old files to see what needed to be retained and what needed to be restored.

I found versions of stuff I do now from the 80s that was all done by hand--of course we've long moved to excel. It took me forever to go through the files because I kept getting distracted by reading how we used to do the stuff. We apparently started getting computerized in the early 90s.

We also used to have a bunch of road atlases around that people could just take with them on business trips...google maps didn't always exist!

[OttoVonBismarck]

I was in High School in the mid-80s so not quite old enough, and by the time I was done with my time in the Army which is not a representative workplace, offices in the civilian Department of the Army (where I got my first real "civilian" job) had already adopted computers to a decent degree. Win95, I remember them only being on an internal network at the time though.

I did have occasion to visit some offices in the 80s and even 70s though:

-Grandmother was a HR executive with Bell Atlantic (one of the "Baby Bells"), she had a private office, no computer in it. When I'd go in to visit her there would be computers in the building though, I think they were using them to speed up some typical back-office clerical tasks so the users would've been your secretaries / file clerks etc.
-My uncle that was very close to the family was a lawyer at a decent sized law firm, his office in the 1980s looked like a very stereotypical law office from the movies. Big wood desk, wall lined in law books, no computer anywhere to be seen.
-My Mom worked at a school for special needs kids in the 80s, she had an administrative office but spent most of her time in a class room, her office was pretty sparse, typewriter, some office supplies, one of those industrial metal desks that seemed ubiquitous in educational settings of the era.