Prompted by a Twitter comment I saw which I've been thinking about for a while since. But what did people do in offices in, say, the mid-80s?
It was before the internet and before common PCs (I think - at least in the UK) and I just have no concept of what office work looked like at that point. The best I have is Mad Men (typing, smoking and sexual harassment) and maybe that's what the workplace was like but I feel like that's pretty rarefied and rather different from, say, working for a bank or a manufacturer or a law firm in 1985.
So in the same way as people of my generation have started chatting about the things from our childhood that just don't make sense now (growing up pre-smartphone is the big one) - I wonder for people who were working before the internet and maybe before PC adoption what was your working life like? So much of my day is spent on my emails I can't really work out what else people did - where there just lots of phone calls?
The only thing I can think of is I remember an older partner saying that he thought the introduction of track changes ruined law because it encouraged people to spend ages fighting over trivialities. When you had to physically read and make changes you prioritised more :lol:
Edit: AND - incidentally how did you even do track changes between two sides? I get that it'd be red pen (because it's still red pen often) internally but in terms of showing a mark-up did someone re-type the entire agreement with red ink or bold for changes? :blink:
Okay so I was 10 in 1985 so can't exactly answer your question.
But I was working in a lawyer's office as early as 1998 so I can kind-of extrapolate back. It was a one-man office so I don't think we even had email - or if we did it was scarcely used.
You spent a fair bit of time writing and responding to letters for starters, instead of emails. Many would be faxed (not sure how widely that was in 1985), but just as many were mailed or bike-couriered.
We had to generate our documents on computers (which in the conservative law world would not be used yet in 1985), but we still had a typewriting and regularly used it (for filling in pre-printed forms). That would have been even more widely used in 1985.
Dictation was a huge thing - the lawyer would go through files, read out instructions on each including dictating letters, then the assistant would go back, listen to the recording and follow the instructions. They absolutely were doing that in 1985.
Legal research was paper, paper, paper. When I was in law school we started learning how to research using specialized databases, but knowing how to "hit the books" was absolutely essential.
They filed things a lot. There were huge file rooms with people whose only job it was was to file things and retrieve them. I spent a few summers in the early and mid 1990s working in some of them. I injured my back one carrying around huge file boxes.
And then you had typewriters around generating new records to be filed, though in 1985 they had word processors that would make things a bit more efficient but then you had to print what you made and then file the paper.
Oh and they made lots of forms with blanks to fill in.
And lots of carbon paper. When you used a credit card to make a purchase it had to be done in triplicate so the customer got one copy, the vendor another, and a third for the credit card company. It was a slow and cumbersome process.
I do kind of like old movies and shows that show offices with no computers on the desks. Just a flat surface for you to write on...it is really weird to a 21st century person.
Quote from: Sheilbh on August 30, 2021, 03:46:22 PM
Edit: AND - incidentally how did you even do track changes between two sides? I get that it'd be red pen (because it's still red pen often) internally but in terms of showing a mark-up did someone re-type the entire agreement with red ink or bold for changes? :blink:
Yep. Tons of great work for legal secretaries.
But also things were much shorter back then because of how comparatively labor intensive it was. When I look at old dockets at my current job from the 1970s, I am impressed that they do what we do in hundreds and hundreds of pages in about 10. With computer digitized legal documents you can just put everything in there that before would have been too difficult to include.
Quote from: Barrister on August 30, 2021, 03:58:51 PMDictation was a huge thing - the lawyer would go through files, read out instructions on each including dictating letters, then the assistant would go back, listen to the recording and follow the instructions. They absolutely were doing that in 1985.
:lol: So dictation still is a thing in my experience but basically only done by senior partners for night typing to transcribe (there was also some software but I don't know what it did). No-one from young-ish partner down ever dicatated in my experience.
Quote from: Sheilbh on August 30, 2021, 04:11:33 PM
Quote from: Barrister on August 30, 2021, 03:58:51 PMDictation was a huge thing - the lawyer would go through files, read out instructions on each including dictating letters, then the assistant would go back, listen to the recording and follow the instructions. They absolutely were doing that in 1985.
:lol: So dictation still is a thing in my experience but basically only done by senior partners for night typing to transcribe (there was also some software but I don't know what it did). No-one from young-ish partner down ever dicatated in my experience.
My Dad, a psychologist (well a former one, he retired in 2013), did this for years before he got voice typing software and became his own secretary once his old one retired.
I can remember going to my dad's work mid-80s / he brought some stuff home. He was a newspaper reporter / columnist at the time.
Now newspapers did adopt computers much earlier than some other businesses. Their articles were written on computers, and printed out on very high quality printers.
But what I remember at the time is that the newspaper editors took those printed-out articles and had to lay out every newspaper page by hand, including literally cutting and pasting the articles (and ads, and headlines) to fit the available space.
When desktop publishing software became a thing (which it was just a few years later) it became a massive change for the industry.
Quote from: Sheilbh on August 30, 2021, 03:46:22 PM
Edit: AND - incidentally how did you even do track changes between two sides? I get that it'd be red pen (because it's still red pen often) internally but in terms of showing a mark-up did someone re-type the entire agreement with red ink or bold for changes? :blink:
This was where I should say that I was working for a real estate lawyer. We could do a hundred deals or more in a month, but the contract itself was a 1-2 page pre-printed form typically where you'd just fill in the blanks. Tracking changes in such a form was not exactly difficult...
Quote from: Barrister on August 30, 2021, 04:20:47 PM
Quote from: Sheilbh on August 30, 2021, 03:46:22 PM
Edit: AND - incidentally how did you even do track changes between two sides? I get that it'd be red pen (because it's still red pen often) internally but in terms of showing a mark-up did someone re-type the entire agreement with red ink or bold for changes? :blink:
This was where I should say that I was working for a real estate lawyer. We could do a hundred deals or more in a month, but the contract itself was a 1-2 page pre-printed form typically where you'd just fill in the blanks. Tracking changes in such a form was not exactly difficult...
Yeah stuff was much shorter back then. That is a huge difference.
Quote from: Sheilbh on August 30, 2021, 03:46:22 PM
Prompted by a Twitter comment I saw which I've been thinking about for a while since. But what did people do in offices in, say, the mid-80s?
It was before the internet and before common PCs (I think - at least in the UK) and I just have no concept of what office work looked like at that point. The best I have is Mad Men (typing, smoking and sexual harassment) and maybe that's what the workplace was like but I feel like that's pretty rarefied and rather different from, say, working for a bank or a manufacturer or a law firm in 1985.
So in the same way as people of my generation have started chatting about the things from our childhood that just don't make sense now (growing up pre-smartphone is the big one) - I wonder for people who were working before the internet and maybe before PC adoption what was your working life like? So much of my day is spent on my emails I can't really work out what else people did - where there just lots of phone calls?
The only thing I can think of is I remember an older partner saying that he thought the introduction of track changes ruined law because it encouraged people to spend ages fighting over trivialities. When you had to physically read and make changes you prioritised more :lol:
Edit: AND - incidentally how did you even do track changes between two sides? I get that it'd be red pen (because it's still red pen often) internally but in terms of showing a mark-up did someone re-type the entire agreement with red ink or bold for changes? :blink:
Tracked changes were typically done with a red pen and a ruler - drawing a straight line under the portions of the text you changed.
The equivalent of emails was when the mail was delivered to your desk typically around 10 - Then you spend time going through the pile to determine what needed prompt attention and what could wait.
The really significant difference is nobody expected a quick response - 1-2 weeks was the norm.
The university I work for had thousands of filing cabinets, huge rooms dedicated to documents, and large typing pools. When I went to university my first year (1984) I was considered odd because I had an Atari computer (not for word processing, but rather playing games - nothing ever changes) and the dorm had one station (one of those old monitor/keyboard setup) downstairs for 12 floors of students - nobody ever used it too much except the nerds playing Spacewar! or something.
When I got my MA in history in 1993 I was in the first class allowed to use a word processor and printer for my thesis, all the years before you had to have a good typist. That saved my bacon, thank you WordPerfect.
I was just a little kid at the time but my dad's office always had computers on the desks. Of course, he was a computer programmer so that might have had something to do with it. They weren't PCs, they were dumb terminals hooked to the mainframe. Still they produced a lot of paper. My dad would come home with these big stacks of green and white paper with computer code on one side. The other side was blank and I could draw on them.
Quote from: Sheilbh on August 30, 2021, 03:46:22 PM
Prompted by a Twitter comment I saw which I've been thinking about for a while since. But what did people do in offices in, say, the mid-80s?
It was before the internet and before common PCs (I think - at least in the UK) and I just have no concept of what office work looked like at that point. The best I have is Mad Men (typing, smoking and sexual harassment) and maybe that's what the workplace was like but I feel like that's pretty rarefied and rather different from, say, working for a bank or a manufacturer or a law firm in 1985.
....
Let me get this straight you and some other people in the office/home offices are wondering what people did in offices before smart-phones,the web and email?
Maybe some of the time they did what you were doing, making non-worked related conversations? :P
Quote from: mongers on August 30, 2021, 06:47:06 PM
Quote from: Sheilbh on August 30, 2021, 03:46:22 PM
Prompted by a Twitter comment I saw which I've been thinking about for a while since. But what did people do in offices in, say, the mid-80s?
It was before the internet and before common PCs (I think - at least in the UK) and I just have no concept of what office work looked like at that point. The best I have is Mad Men (typing, smoking and sexual harassment) and maybe that's what the workplace was like but I feel like that's pretty rarefied and rather different from, say, working for a bank or a manufacturer or a law firm in 1985.
....
Let me get this straight you and some other people in the office/home offices are wondering what people did in offices before smart-phones,the web and email?
Maybe some of the time they did what you were doing, making non-worked related conversations? :P
Sexual harassment was already covered
Quote from: Razgovory on August 30, 2021, 05:46:05 PM
I was just a little kid at the time but my dad's office always had computers on the desks. Of course, he was a computer programmer so that might have had something to do with it. They weren't PCs, they were dumb terminals hooked to the mainframe. Still they produced a lot of paper. My dad would come home with these big stacks of green and white paper with computer code on one side. The other side was blank and I could draw on them.
My dad brought home the same paper. Reams of it with holes along the side. It was definitely the best drawing paper for a kid.
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.
Also, if people wore glasses, they were ENORMOUS, like this:
(https://flashbak.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/lynda-carter-glasses.jpg)
and if men had facial hair, which they usually didn't, it would only ever be a moustache.
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.
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.
Quote from: Syt on August 30, 2021, 11:11:38 PM
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? :o
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.
Quote from: Barrister on August 30, 2021, 11:40:18 PM
No computers in 1999? :o
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!"
Quote from: Syt on August 30, 2021, 11:11:38 PM
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!"
:lol:
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.
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 :lol:
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.
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.
Quote from: Syt on August 31, 2021, 05:14:42 AM
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.
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.
QuoteOne 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.
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!
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.
I just remembered ordering books in the 80s. We had a bookshop in our little town, and I was always impressed that if you ordered a book it would usually be there next day. Their catalog (outside the publisher catalogs they had that you could take for free) was on micro-fiche. You told them the book you wanted, they'd look it the ISBN number. They had a little box with a num pad attached to a phone line. Once a day they had a time window during which they could transmit their ISBNs to the central storage in Hamburg via this box, and the delivery would be there early next morning. For ordering back issues of Star Wars comics, they had to write post cards to the publisher - they didn't like doing that much for us. :(
Offices were noiser, because -- although word processors were becoming the norm-- there were still a lot of typewriters being used. I remember being interviewed at a law office for a proofreader position around 1987 and being walked through the typing pool. Phones were louder. They rang with that loud shrill. And because instant messaging wasn't a thing, there was a lot more hustle and bustle.
Oh...and those intra office mail deliveries. The ones with the brown envelopes and you signed your name when you received it and then used the same envelope to send a document to someone else in the office.
Alas, pinching secretaries' bottoms was frowned upon then.
Quote from: Sheilbh on August 30, 2021, 03:46:22 PM
Prompted by a Twitter comment I saw which I've been thinking about for a while since. But what did people do in offices in, say, the mid-80s?
It was before the internet and before common PCs (I think - at least in the UK) and I just have no concept of what office work looked like at that point. The best I have is Mad Men (typing, smoking and sexual harassment) and maybe that's what the workplace was like but I feel like that's pretty rarefied and rather different from, say, working for a bank or a manufacturer or a law firm in 1985.
So in the same way as people of my generation have started chatting about the things from our childhood that just don't make sense now (growing up pre-smartphone is the big one) - I wonder for people who were working before the internet and maybe before PC adoption what was your working life like? So much of my day is spent on my emails I can't really work out what else people did - where there just lots of phone calls?
The only thing I can think of is I remember an older partner saying that he thought the introduction of track changes ruined law because it encouraged people to spend ages fighting over trivialities. When you had to physically read and make changes you prioritised more :lol:
Edit: AND - incidentally how did you even do track changes between two sides? I get that it'd be red pen (because it's still red pen often) internally but in terms of showing a mark-up did someone re-type the entire agreement with red ink or bold for changes? :blink:
I followed my dad to his employers office on fridays&saturdays. Back then, the standard work week was 44h, so lots of people worked on saturdays.
There were tables, pen & paper. There would have been one secretary per manager, she would be the one with the dactylo. They had mainframe computers by the late 80s, mostly used for secretaries and accounting. Bidding was done on paper spreadsheet, plans were blue, printed with some form of alcohol powder. They received invitation to bid by telex. The youngest boy in the room was in charge of going downstairs and bringing coffee up for everyone (7-8 people), all for a 10cents tip. :mad:
Quote from: Syt on August 31, 2021, 05:14:42 AM
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.
That is what I did during and after high school. Worked as a labourer on construction sites, farms etc. Back then the only thing that mattered was having a strong back and steel toe boots. That started changing here with safety regulations in the late 80s (there were a number of deaths in construction industry) which required proper training. And the creation of a vocational institute to provide the training programs.
Quote from: Sheilbh on August 30, 2021, 03:46:22 PM
Prompted by a Twitter comment I saw which I've been thinking about for a while since. But what did people do in offices in, say, the mid-80s?
It was before the internet and before common PCs (I think - at least in the UK) and I just have no concept of what office work looked like at that point. The best I have is Mad Men (typing, smoking and sexual harassment) and maybe that's what the workplace was like but I feel like that's pretty rarefied and rather different from, say, working for a bank or a manufacturer or a law firm in 1985.
So in the same way as people of my generation have started chatting about the things from our childhood that just don't make sense now (growing up pre-smartphone is the big one) - I wonder for people who were working before the internet and maybe before PC adoption what was your working life like? So much of my day is spent on my emails I can't really work out what else people did - where there just lots of phone calls?
The only thing I can think of is I remember an older partner saying that he thought the introduction of track changes ruined law because it encouraged people to spend ages fighting over trivialities. When you had to physically read and make changes you prioritised more :lol:
Edit: AND - incidentally how did you even do track changes between two sides? I get that it'd be red pen (because it's still red pen often) internally but in terms of showing a mark-up did someone re-type the entire agreement with red ink or bold for changes? :blink:
I was working in an office in 1985, and we had only minicomputers (small mainframes, not microcomputers as today's desktops were first called) and some fairly sizable word processors (with these giant 10" floppy disks). Only a very few people worked with computers and word processors. The rest of us had pen and paper and handheld calculators.
the valuable guys in my office were the graphic artists (not computer graphics; hand-drawn graphics) that could make your reports look like a million bucks or a million sucks, depending on whether they liked you and whether the bosses were going to see it.
At the start of the day you say the folks in Documents to get your classified working papers from their safes, and at the end of the day you dropped them off. Eventually, we dropped that system for safes in every room because we just had too many people to process info security from a central location.
One of the keys to keep the bosses, artists, and secretaries happy is to avoid typing and adding graphics before you had to to meet a deadline, because changes were manpower-intensive. There was a lot of interaction between members of the team because everyone could only do a small portion of the job, and the way to tell people what you'd done was to show and tell in a conference room. It felt a lot more like teamwork than the later, networked PC office did.
In the Army at that time stationed at Ft Rucker, AL. with the Pathfinder company. Trained hard and played hard.
Quote from: 11B4V on September 01, 2021, 07:08:20 PM
In the Army at that time stationed at Ft Rucker, AL. with the Pathfinder company. Trained hard and played hard.
:cool:
One of my first jobs was putting paper personnel files into the correct personnel folder at my public university. Basically looking for the right filing cabinet and putting the paper in the right folder.
This was around 2004, but I imagine it was pretty similar to how it was 20 years prior.
Does anyone remember the card catalogs at the libraries?
This picture is from 1985.
I believe it's a fair representation of the average office smoke break.
(https://i.imgur.com/NsKDV14.jpeg)
https://officesnapshots.com/articles/must-read-the-office-of-the-future-from-1985/
Quote"Are word processors, computer terminals, and printers turning your office into something that looks like a set for a television serial with a science fiction theme?
It's a direction that will become even more noticeable in the future, says Lawrence Lerner, an architect specializing in office design. According to Lerner, whose firm, Environetics International recently designed a prototype office of the future, changes will be necessary to accomodate new technology.
The prototype office features optical scanners (you've probably seen them at the supermarket checkout counter) and multiple flat screens that can hang on the wall like a picture or sit on a desk like a placemat. Printers that take information directly from the optical scanner and churn out paper copies are also likely to be featured.
In the Environetics office of the future, several workstations are arranged inside a dome-like interior structure so that all who work together are in the same cluster. Instead of the windowed executive offices of today, located around the perimeter of a modern building with clerical workers accommodated in a large windowless center section, tomorrow's office will accommodate those who work together in the same or nearby clusters.
The individual workstations will have less drawer and surface space than at present but they will accomodate more computer components.
As many as nine page sized screens may be found at each station. Each will be capable of displaying information stored in a number of different computer files. The telephone will be an important component since it will be used to carry on conversations, as at present, and so call up information from databases elsewhere. The phone will facilitate conferences with colleagues in several cities at the same time. Once a "meeting" is over, the information discussed will be updated and refiled automatically.
Privacy and sound control will be achieved by collapsible dome-like structures within whose walls will be located heat, ventilating and air conditioning services. These domes will be constructed from woven panels of glass and nylon fibers that are embedded with lead. The lead would make the fabric dense, therefore soundproof, according to Lerner.
Technology is also likely to lead to change in the office social routine. The bulletin board of today with its announcements of retirements and items for same won't be necessary. Instead, individual workers, each of whom will have access to a computer, will be able to call up the bulletin board on the screen and read what's there when they wish.
Will this mean that trips to the watercooler will be a thing of the past? Not necessarily, says Lerner. Breaks in the routine like a walk down the hall will still be a worker's prerogative. Though some observers predict that more individuals will work from home, communicating via computer. Lerner thinks most people will continue to work in an office environment.
The office is a social environment that satisfies the need for human contact, and so it will persist, he says.
No matter how technology changes the looks of the office for most of us, the private executive office is likely to continue in all its lonely splendor for the company's top executives, according to Susan Szenasy, author of several books in the "Office Book Design Series" which is published by Facts on File.
A private office is a reward for the individual and also a symbol to others that a person has arrived at the top of the hierarchy.
"Once executives attain a certain level of power, they seem to feel a luxurious office is deserved and even that it is required of them." she said."
Source: https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=0DssAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Mc4EAAAAIBAJ&pg=6523,7100934
Quote from: Jacob on September 02, 2021, 01:47:45 AM
This picture is from 1985.
I believe it's a fair representation of the average office smoke break.
(https://i.imgur.com/NsKDV14.jpeg)
Did they have "casual Friday" back then? :hmm:
Quote from: 11B4V on September 01, 2021, 10:24:37 PM
Does anyone remember the card catalogs at the libraries?
Sure, also I found myself being nostalgic about the bookshop using a micro-film catalogue to order a book, that Syt posted about up thread; I'm Old, real Old. :)
Quote from: Jacob on September 02, 2021, 01:47:45 AM
This picture is from 1985.
I believe it's a fair representation of the average office smoke break.
Really don't think famous popstars where at average smoke breaks in 1985
Quote from: 11B4V on September 01, 2021, 10:24:37 PM
Does anyone remember the card catalogs at the libraries?
Yes!
Quote from: 11B4V on September 01, 2021, 10:24:37 PM
Does anyone remember the card catalogs at the libraries?
Fondly.
Quote from: Jacob on September 02, 2021, 01:47:45 AM
I believe it's a fair representation of the average office smoke break.
(https://i.imgur.com/NsKDV14.jpeg)
Going commando was generally frowned upon back in the day - and wearing jeans.
Quote from: 11B4V on September 01, 2021, 10:24:37 PM
Does anyone remember the card catalogs at the libraries?
I do. When I was middle school they taught how to use the card catalogues and the periodicals and all that stuff. When I went to college the school used an entirely different system and I couldn't find anything. I ended just picking up books at random.
"It's not a bad paper, but it's about French fables. This is a biology class and you were suppose to write about watersheds."
What system did your college use?
The Don't-he Decibel system.
:D
Quote from: Josephus on September 02, 2021, 10:08:22 AM
Really don't think famous popstars where at average smoke breaks in 1985
You'd be surprised!
I was 9 years old, playing pirated Apple II games like Kareteka, the original Castle Wolfenstein, Taipan!, The Ancient Art of War, the early games in the Ultima series, and that Apple II 4X classic, Lordlings of Yore.
Quote from: jimmy olsen on September 02, 2021, 10:09:59 AM
Quote from: 11B4V on September 01, 2021, 10:24:37 PM
Does anyone remember the card catalogs at the libraries?
Yes!
I havent' been to a library since my university days in the late 80s. If I were to go to one now to do research I'd be lost. No card catalogues? No microfiche?
Quote from: Josephus on September 02, 2021, 03:06:23 PM
Quote from: jimmy olsen on September 02, 2021, 10:09:59 AM
Quote from: 11B4V on September 01, 2021, 10:24:37 PM
Does anyone remember the card catalogs at the libraries?
Yes!
I havent' been to a library since my university days in the late 80s. If I were to go to one now to do research I'd be lost. No card catalogues? No microfiche?
You can probably already look up the book on your local library website and reserve it right now.
Getting precise coordinates is an important part of the job as a radio engineer. We use this information to model our radio coverage. When I started working as an engineer (1994) our office had a series of cabinets which held USGS 7.5 minute maps (https://www.usgs.gov/core-science-systems/national-geospatial-program/topographic-maps). You'd have to find the correct map, put a dot on the map at the location you were trying to get coordinates of, get the nearest 30 second markings, draw a trapezoid from them and decline your location. Then you'd have to count contour lines to get your height (that task would have been much easier in Florida than it was in Michigan.) Today you can do all that in about 5 seconds on Google Earth.
(GIS and ARC did exist at the time, but it was expensive and you almost needed a college degree in GIS to use it.)
At the time radio propagation software (which predicts radio coverage) was in its infancy, but it existed. About ten years before that you would have had to draw your coverage contours by hand using some crude formulas.
When I first started our network was in Detroit, but the central switch was located in Chicago. Each cell site has its own database of parameters in the switch which impact how the site behaves and they can be adjusted to improve performance. At the time the switch manager in Chicago didn't trust us with even reader-only access to the switch; so, every day, his team would print out all the data from every site (about 100 sites, 3 pages of data) and FedEx them to us.
1985 - I was working in IT, still new and learning, programming and operations. Few personal computers as I recall. My cousins had a computer store back then, before computers were sold by the big box stores. I remember the internet was a new and strange thing, dial-up modems, very archaic compared to today. Now I can't imagine a world without the convenience of the internet. Newspapers and news magazines of all kinds were commonplace. I was hunting with friends and family in those years, in Canada and all over New England.