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

Everything you typed had to be to a set pattern, e.g. if doing a block form address you would type the county - full stop - six spaces and then the post code! Two line spaces between 'Dear Sir' and the Subject line, and six line spaces between 'Yours faithfully' and the name of the sender (underlined!). Once learnt, never forgotten - I still do it!!

In those days, to be able to type up documents and presentations, you had to know how many spaces there were across a page, and so work out how many spaces to put in so that you could start in the middle of the page

You missed a trick there. You set a tab to the centre of the page, move your carriage to the centre and then count backwards doing one back space for every two characters/spaces. So if you wanted to centre the title "word heading", you'd go to the centre and then six back spaces (as "word heading" is 12 characters/spaces).

In those days, to be able to type up documents and presentations, you had to know how many spaces there were across a page, and so work out how many spaces to put in so that you could start in the middle of the page. Or if you wanted to do a table, you had to count all the characters that you were going to need to type, to be able to work out how wide your table was going to be/how wide your columns were going to be

I loved doing that.

@Jasmine, if it's RPG/400 and not RPG/4000 you mean, then yes! Wikipedia: "RPG/400 was effectively RPG III running on AS/400."

Laughing at some of the memories this is bringing back.

I trained as an accountant. We were so excited when our department of 30 people was given 4 "portable" Macintoshes to take out to client sites. Portable? - they must have been at least 3 ft cube and so heavy. We werent allowed to take a taxi so had to drag them to the tube.

Was multimate a pc package, ringing a bell

I worked in the civil service mid -80s. What was the machine that printed stuff out on ticker tape but almost in Braille? Was it a telex? It made a very loud clunking sound?

To estimate the number of unemployed we would put all the record cards in a filing drawer and push them back as far as they would go. Then count them and do the same to the other drawers but estimate whether they looked more or less and by how much! All guess work.
The retail price index was some little clerical assistants going to the local supermarkets and noting down the price of a set number of essential purchases. We never went to a cafe and made up the prices. The rate of inflation was worked out using this.

I got a job working for the local authority in the mid 70s. I was called a 'key-to-disc operator' and I had to input hospital data from hospital records onto a very basic computer system. We all sat at terminals in a large office and did the same thing all day long. Sometimes at the end of the month, there was very little data coming through so they used to let us all go home early.
I wonder what happened to all those records.

BIWI
When I run training courses I remind people how data storage space used to be at a premium by holding up a floppy disk ....

or in teen speak "wow, you 3D printed the icon"

Daisywheels!! And I remember all that counting characters to type a table

Daisy wheels! I mentioned golfballs up thread but couldn't remember what the others were called!

My dear friend used to go for a "non-smoking" break and it went as far as the union.

Anyone remember golfballs and daisywheels?

'save' not 'ave'!

I started my career as a secretary, and my post-grad secretarial course taught us typing on a mixture of the old 'sit up and beg' manual typewriters and electric ones - the college didn't have enough for us to have all our lessons on the electric ones!

In those days, to be able to type up documents and presentations, you had to know how many spaces there were across a page, and so work out how many spaces to put in so that you could start in the middle of the page. Or if you wanted to do a table, you had to count all the characters that you were going to need to type, to be able to work out how wide your table was going to be/how wide your columns were going to be.

Within a very short space of time (after which I'd been promoted) we got PCs. But no-one knew how to use them. For some reason - still don't know why - I had to show everyone how to use it. It started with knowing how to turn the thing on, because the switch was right round the back of the machine!

And I remember using Lotus 1-2-3, where you had to keep changing the floppy disk, depending on what you wanted to do. I was typing a long report out, and it filled the disk - but there was no way to ave what you'd done once the disk was full, so I lost almost all my work!

I also recall I printed out Dilbert comic strips and hung on the wall. Here's a good one from that time period: dilbert.com/strip/1992-10-04 and here another one: dilbert.com/strip/1996-12-08

They were all in black-and-white, mind, as the colour printer and colour screen wasn't invented just yet, or had just been invented but was far too expensive for most people and firms. But the comic strips were quite good, still.

At work, before email, you also sent fax messages to other facilities. This was as late as in the mid 1990's. First you wrote it out on paper, like an ordinary letter one would (then) write on a typewriter. "Dear Sirs" and all that. Then you scanned it into the machine, which made a lot of funny noises, and it popped out on the other side of a telephone line, quite blurry and fuzzy. I recall I was in the unfortunate position to having to word some answers to an English firm (my first equally daily language isn't and wasn't English) and I found the task quite overwhelming. Imagine you lot having suddenly to write a formal business letter in French with no other tool than the French you've learned from your school teacher until the age of 18 when you left school! The English were (of course) quite good at English, some in superb command of it even. I said to myself: -Oh God, what do I do now! (said in my own language naturally). So I went through virtually all their previous communication, scouring for useful sentences and snippets of words that I could use and put together again as a jig-saw puzzle to make up whatever was needed to be said. (I only had my school English, remember, so writing out something from scratch had been an impossible task.) Furthermore I didn't even know how to set up a letter, what template to use so to speak, so I meticulously copied theirs - lock, stock, and barrel - from heading to signature style. I don't know how well they took it, as for the guy or guys at the other end it must have been to some degree like someone holding up a mirror so they virtually were receiving letters style-wise written by themselves. In fact, as I recall it, nearly not one sentence went into it that hadn't been written by themselves in one form or another. (But I was desperate.) I also bought a big copy of the OED, the accepted authority on the English language. That's why I could even today joke and say I've learned Oxford English, as a pun. My current level of English took off at that moment, spiked even, and what is my current level is seen here now, and in fact two years later I took a Cambridge CPE test and got "grade A" on it (which is supposedly the highest) and similarly on a TOEFL I scored 597 points of 600, all of it thanks to that episode. I'm not surprised, as my "teachers" had been both adamant and good at their jobs.

I'm 52 and I've actually seen a punch card once, when touring a facility during my school years (an excursion). What we saw was a room with deaf ladies typing on machines, like typewriters. Oh, the noise! That's why they hired only deaf people to the position, they all used sign language like Macarons to communicate with each other. The manager was hearing, and sat in an adjacent room, sound proof from the former naturally.

I can't do metal arithmetic well as I was handed a calculator in school at age 13, but everybody older than me seems to be experts doing mental arithmetic.

Otherwise I remember everybody had terminals on their desks, it was a keyboard and screen (but no computer, the computer in the form of big IBM or VAX machines stood somewhere else in big rooms (the machines were big, hence the rooms were big too) with special ventilation to keep them cool. People wearing white coats went in and out, like lab coats used at hospitals. The computers were in one way more exciting then than today as you could know virtually everything about how they were run, you were totally in command of the machine (and not the other way around) and also felt that you were closer to the technical frontier of progress. Nowadays a computer feels just like any ordinary piece of equipment and you have no idea how it works inside, really, and if it bricks you're quite helpless.

I did the first Data Processing course out local college offered way back in the early 70's and the computer took up the whole floor of the building. But prior to that I worked for the summer in the coding department of a big chain of supermarkets and we had to code all the items that were sold so the punch operators could produce a card that was then used for stock control once the data had been processed.

Oh, and if you wanted the computer to work something out for you, you filled in a sheet in Cobol, took it to the data entry operator, who produced a punched card, which went into the computer overnight and the next day you got a great batch of green paper out of the computer, which had to be split into individual enquiries and given to the person who'd requested it

You must be really old.

Glitter - yep if you wanted to know something you went to the library. I remember as a kid going to the library and the librarian helping me find answers to things!!

I visited a council HQ the other week and the receptionist addressed me by first name, and my male line manager as Mr. The whole place was like a set from Life on Mars, maybe they did feel they were time travelling...

Slightly outside the time bracket but I remember using the BBC computers for word processing at school and when you got to the end of a line you had to hit space, space, space... til you got to the end then could use return to move down a line...

The first Internet cafe opened in a nearby city in I think 1995. Was very excited went and got myself an email address which started meringue@... No one I knew had internet at home. Tried to surf the web but search engines hadn't been invented yet so if you wanted to visit a web page you had to know the web address and type it into the http field at the top...

I was chatting about this at work yesterday and one woman was telling us how when she worked in a library people would ring up with queries and one of them would trot off to the reference section to try and find the answer, then ring the person back. Like a human google.

God, yes, the mental arithmetic! I learned lightning fast addition and multiplication working in a greengrocers when I was 14. Still got it

lunch