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

[Choccyhobnob]

The childhood memories thread reminded me of something I have wondered for years!

I work in an office and have done for the last 12 years. I have never known a time before emails and photocopiers.

My question is this - what did you actually do? I just can't imagine how office life worked back then and I'm really interested!

Thank you for indulging my perhaps naïve questions!

I started work early 1980's and I remember my secretarial training at college 1981-2. They advertised that they offered word processing training as part of our course as this was the latest thing and would help us get the top jobs. The training consisted of the teacher sitting with the instruction booklet for the WP and telling us 'press that button now' . As they only had one WP in the college we all had about 2 hours training over the whole year as we had to do it one at a time.

When I started work I used golf ball typewriter, we had to take 2 carbon copies, mistakes rubbed out with a special rubber which rubbed holes in the paper so you ended up starting again. It was amazing when I first got a typewriter with a self correct ribbon.

In my second job we all used typewriters but there were 2 massive word processors Ina separate room which had huge floppy discs. The secretaries took it in turn to use these if someone had a long report to type.

I also remember we used to take it in turn to make the tea in the middle of the morning and afternoon . There was a rota for this but only female members of staff were on the Rota because it wasn't right to expect one of the male clerks to make tea or wash up.

I learned shorthand at college - pitman 2000. I still use it some time when I'm minuting meetings - mainly I use a lap top but occasionally I'll have to minute at a venue where's no room for my laptop so I get my shorthand pad out!

Alpha - eek! this programming language that you speak of, is it the same as RPG 4000?

kazzy
ooh, the black Amstrad luggable
I got one of those when my white one broke down
it was well posh as it had a built in operating system !!!!

At risk of outing myself ......

1989
I got a Temp job with a company
arrived at 9am to be greeted with
"ah, you are the spreadsheet expert, this is what we want put on it, we'll be back from training after lunch"
and they all left ....
I phoned may agency who said
"you know no less than them, apparently F1 is help"

and by lunchtime I WAS the spreadsheet expert

"My first office job was in the civil service. The whole organisation was a homage to driving itself along on a giant wave of self perpetuated paperwork, photocopying and tea."

Change tea to coffee and you have the Ministry of Defence today.

Not office work, but when I worked as a barmaid I had to know the prices of all the drinks and add them up in my head. I had a little test as part of my interview.

Lord, the smoking

I used to eat lunh in the strong room to avoid the staff room which was solid with tobacco fog. I also recall the lighting up behind the counter the instant the bank doors closed. So relieved that's all over now.

I'd forgotten the luncheon vouchers. Think they were something like 40p a day and could be used in supermarkets if you took a packed lunch and didn't use them. They eventually got bought out with union agreement for a one off payment of around £200 which was cheap, cheap, cheap.

lunch

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

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.

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 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...

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!!

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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!

'save' not 'ave'!

Anyone remember golfballs and daisywheels?

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.

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

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"

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.