For those of you who worked in an office in 1960's - 1980's

There were no PCs, just green screen "dumb terminals" and the processing was done by a GIANT mainframe computer which filled a HUGE room of its own.

Jesus! I can't believe this. How did anything even get finished? Must have taken forever.

Late 1980s. First job at a county council, low level HR role.

So much drinking!!!!! Every time there was a meeting at lunchtime there would be red and white wine on offer along with the usual soft drinks and buffet. Frequently we would go to the pub at lunchtime and ALWAYS on a Friday lunchtime. Drinking alcohol was expected and anyone who didn't drink had to have an excuse and was viewed with distrust.

We hand wrote letters, walked them to the typing pool, collected them later, there were always corrections required so then they went back to the typing pool at least one more time. Other than this the role was mainly photocopying. In my second role we had one computer, a green screen "dumb terminal" shared between three of us. The processing was done by the main frame computer which took up a vast room of its own maybe 2,000 square feet.

Late 80s early 90s started in banking…. My entire job seemed to be answering phone and had a huge pile of faxes (bank statements) I had to send every day. More on random days (first, 15th, last) as that was the only way clients could do bank reconciliations. I can still remember most of the account numbers for these clients as I had to input manually into our system every day to pull the statements.
Also we were allowed to smoke (obviously) which I admit I bloody loved at the time. Later being forced to go outside for a fag probably encouraged me to smoke more as it was all time away from our desks! Looking back so many jobs were just work for works sake, but somehow the economy kept turning!

I worked in pensions in the 00s. I remember we would get hand written letters asking how annuity their pension would buy. We would then have to go and look up the pension on microfiche records and I would write and tell them. The answer always seemed to be around £3,600 a year.

I remember those wonderful days when I could do my actual work and people could only contact me one at a time, via phone. Glorious.

In 1980 I worked at the head office of a building society during the summer holidays. This was in the days before electronic bank transfers, and one of my tasks was to type up cheques to merchant banks that would be deposited overnight. I would have to type out a cheque for £6,000,000 and take it up to the fifth floor for two of the top executives to check and sign. This was when I was earning about £50 a week!
It really was another world. Computers were just beginning to be a thing, no emails, a typing pool, much more use of phones.

I started working full time in 1985. No fax machine for first two years, no computer unless you were in accounts. Electronic typewriter, which was a luxury item. You spent at least 50% of your time on the phone, and 40% of your time writing memos. If there was a dispute the memos used to go backwards and forwards. Only as internal post only came round twice a day, a real row took a week to build.

If the photocopier died, it was a Major Incident.

I will have to do a bit of searching - I reviewed one but it must be more than 10 years ago now (gulp) as I wrote my last review for that site in January 2012. I can probably find the review and the title of the book but it will take ma a bit of searching, and I've got to go out to a library now.

Thanks for reviving this zombie thread - I want to reread/read it all now. Sorry to anyone who disapproves but as it's so historical anyway....

I know this is an old thread but it's fascinating. My (much older) sister had a temporary office job one summer in the late 70s. For some reason I went into work with her one day, I must have been about 6 or 7. I remember the fog of smoke!

@elkiedee do you have any book recommendations on this topic please? They sound really interesting.

This thread has reminded me of two fantastic books I must reread

Smallbone Deceased by Michael Gilbert
Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers

Can thoroughly recommend for a trip down 30s and 50s office memory lane

When I left school at 16 (1960) I worked in what was then Pensions and National Insurance (Now DSS).

Benefits were worked out manually by clarical officers using mechanical adding machines with big handles. Payments were made on something called a "postal draft" which was written out by hand (by clerical assistants) and sent to the claiment via the post. They took it to the post office for payment and they were only able to cash it in one post office.

Every claiment had a paper folder and these were filed manually at the end of the day and extracted at the beginning of the day by clerical assistants. The office was very hierarchical with strict divisions between the grades of staff. If you worked in the office there was no contact with the public or claiments.

I enjoyed the teamwork and the colleagues but hated the work as I have never been attracted to working with numbers. I went into the library service where at least you saw the public and there were a variety of different jobs.

Our head of branch in the civil service was a woman. That was very unusual in those days. Many women got to deputy but rose no further.

In the print industry, early 70s, we had handwritten job sheets that detailed each process a job had to go through, with an estimate of time and materials to be used. The origination dept would do the artwork and they'd sign it off and say how long the job took, then off to the camera room and platemaking. Then on to the print machines and any finishing necessary - guilotining, binding etc.

This worked well. Then we got computerised. With hand held scanners to log on and off each department's work. These never worked. And pages and pages of print out for each process.

On one memorable occasion the computer produced a job sheet that stretched from one end of the print shop to the other. For a tiny job twice the size of a business card.

The admin side came close to collapse. We hated the computer. In the end we ran a dual system with people filling in the reality of the job by hand and amending the computer record to match as it was so inflexible to set up.

Elsewhere on site we had a typing pool, and individual secretaries for higher management, all with dictaphones.

There was a warehouse with a goods inwards department and the depatch side. Everything was done by hand processed files and notes. The print shop produced a lot of NCR (Non Carbon Reproducing) books with multiple copies in many colours to be processed by different departments and one to the customer. A different world.

Messages went round in reuseable internal messenger envelopes. You'd cross your name and department off the cover and put the next recipient in the next box. We did move to an internal email system that seemed to work well.

Sorry to jump on a zombie thread but I saw recent posts and this has fascinated me. My youth.

I've been working since 1989, but only in an office since 2000....

I remember one day faxing a document over to the other side of the (Huge) site. As it disappeared into the machine, I thought how great this technology was, and how much easier it was than a half hour plus walk to deliver it by hand!

Then as I went back to my desk and my next task, it struck me:

In the old days,

1. I would have got half an hour's exercise.
2. I would have been out in the fresh air.
3. There's a good chance that on the way there I would have bumped into someone I knew, and had a chat.
4. Once I got there, I could have had a chat with the buyer, and maybe a cup of tea.
5. Another half hour back, again with a possible meeting on the way back.

Was this machine making my life easier, or was it just letting me work harder in the time saved?

Re the Gestetner machines, I always remember if you typed too heavily on the stencil type sheets the Os would come out and when you ran them off you would get a big blotch .
I fondly remember the tea lady coming round twice a day with home made cakes

I worked in an office in IT in the mid-late 80s. I did lots of manipulating information into the right format so we could send it over dedicated telephone lines to our satellite offices and on our one hour dedicated phone slot to our suppliers.

I put a lot of numbers into Lotus 1-2-3 and printed out multiple copies of the reports, filing one and sending the others to various department heads.

I came in on a Sunday once a month so I could burn a copy of all the invoices on to a CD-ROM. This replaced a warehouse of dumpsters full of paper invoices that we'd had for the previous 7 years with a small cabinet of 84 neat CDs.

I also used to replace the typewriter ribbon and the golf ball on the typewriter when they wanted to change font for customer mailings (so, what felt like every day!). The office used a lot of carbon paper to make multiple copies but the typewriter could automatically retype the last page, so when they wanted to do multiple copies for a mailing, they typed it once and had the typewriter reprint it another x number of times. Then someone went through each copy to type in the Mr. X and the address. WordPerfect (or possibly WordStar) was around by this time and I spent an age trying to show them how to do a merge so they didn't have to type up the names and addresses each time.

There were photocopiers around in those days (came into offices in the early 60s) and I'd had one at a previous job but were expensive so lots of places didn't have them and in offices I worked in that had them, we used them sparingly and not everyone had access. At one place I worked we had a mimeo machine where you typed what you wanted on a special piece of paper and it could use that to create a sort of die that would reprint it in this weird purpleish ink over and over.

Switchboard was a big deal too. Always had to be staffed. Lots of messages taken on "memo" paper and sent around to the relevent person's desk.

It was much easier to leave your work at work as no one could get hold of you easily if you weren't in the office.

Love these stories. Even in my first job as an office junior in 2000 the internet wasn't common and was only entrusted to a select few senior members of staf. The only thing people seemed to use it for was to check how much they could borrow on a credit card. I also needed to hand deliver things which I loved as we were central and I could pop into HMV on the way back

I was the junior admin/switchboard operator for a College in the very early 80s. I had learnt shorthand at College but not audio (I'd completed a senior secretary's course and PA's weren't expected to Audio type) and it came as a shock when my boss gave me a tape and told me to transcribe it! I was too scared to say I didn't know how so took it back to my office and begged the switchboard operator to explain how to use the machine. She had been Secretary of the Year in the early 1960s so I had a crash course. It took me all day to type these letters and 2 of them had errors I hadn't noticed so had to type them again (which took me less than 15 minutes) second time. I gradually became more proficient but I was never great at Audio.

The lecturers used to get me to type their handouts on a Gestetner and I remember using the correction fluid when I made an error. The handwriting I had to copy was terrible and few of them could spell.

The extensions couldn't make direct calls out, so every out going call had to come through the switchboard , as well as all incoming calls.

Between school and college in the early 70s I worked in the purchasing department of an aircraft manufacturer. There was a female supervisor in charge of 7 or 8 male clerks, and me. She got paid less than the men she was in charge of, but that was fine because she was married and therefore only needed to earn a bit of pin money.

I worked for the then DHSS (pre Income Support)
Each claimant had a file called a casepaper which held all their information and payment details.
My first job involved finding casepapers for the Clerical Officers to work on, taking them round the office on a big trolley, to finance for giros to be prepared and picking up others that were finished with from desks and re-filing them.
I was then promoted so I was the one doing all the benefit calculations manually by hand.

Some of the files were huge if people had been claiming for a long time. They also used to go missing all the time.

Oh the nostalgia!

First ever job was waaaay back was as a key punch operator. When you reached the magic target of 20,000 keystrokes in a day you covered your machine and sat around with all the others eating, smoking (I didn't) drinking tea and knitting and chatting. We were not allowed to go home in case an emergency input was required.

Once a week at a random time the supervisor would test your accuracy. If you didn't pass you had to do more than the daily target as a punishment. No phones on desks, top dog at a desk on the side overseeing everything.

Before I moved on the first male kpo arrived. The start of equality ha ha.

There was a pub across the road, every Friday lunchtime we got pished. Great times.

I am still friends with many of the girls I worked with back then. That was more than 35 years ago now. Because the work was so boring we made up for it with chat and gossip.

I remember sending credit report requests on the telex and to, 'wait for a message ending in 'G'.

This meant that the batch had successfully been sent. Later that day the telex would spring into life and start spewing a long scroll of paper onto the floor.

This would be collected by a clerk, cut with scissors and stapled to the relevant file so the junior underwriter could see what their credit history was.

My first ever office job was in 1988.

I remember telex machines were just going out as fax machines were coming in. It seemed just wow that you could send correspondence anywhere in the world. 'I'll fax you the proforma' is a rejoinder that I remember from those times.

There were Puma telex machines and maybe Lynx or the name of another big cat.

I was working for a leasing company and we also had and, 'OLI' machine. This was an OnLineIndex machine for more credit reports.

I used a green screen computer as I was a Visual Display Unit operator/data entry clerk. I envied the girls in the typing pool with their Wang computers and audio typing machines !

We sent out letters as a batch at the end of the day. I remember the printer was this huge noisy thing that reminded me of the teleprinter that used to print the football scores on Saturday afternoons Q.

We then split the letters up as they would have been printed on continuous paper and we put the letters in envelopes and took them to the post room.

My first job was as a secretary in 1961 to a group manager in a finance company for the princely wage of £6.50 a week. Every morning he had a huge pile of folders on his desk, he would dictate letters to me which would fill at least one side of a shorthand notepad, the files would be transferred to my desk where I would type the letters on a manual typewriter.

No computers, faxes, photocopiers, telex - if multiple copes were required of a document, I would type it on a waxed sheet and ink it off on a Gestetner machine. I also made copious cups of tea, answered phone calls etc.