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I am 31 and work in a legal office, and I simply cannot imagine doing my job without the internet, especially email.
1. How did people send internal and external messages? Were you on the phone all day, or were fax and physical couriers the way to go?
2. Many of my coworkers use the company internet and their work emails for personal use and office gossip. Were phones and internal memos used the same way?
3. I can never tell my supervisor that I don't know something, because he will always tell me that the answer is on Google and I'm not trying hard enough. Before the internet, was "I don't know" a legitimate answer?
4. Do you feel that you've become more productive or less productive since having the internet at work?
1. Physical memos often in "routing envelopes" that were delivered by "mail room personel" were pretty common. Some folks would write comments on the "sign off slip" others liked PostIt notes but if too many people used 'em nothing really made sense and long then there were winded types thwt would attach additional pages to the "routed memo".UGH! Damned memos would have like 10 pages of attachments. Makes email chains look easy to follow. FedEx was often used for important legal-ish docs while ultra critical stuff went via courier. Couriers were (and still are) one step above homeless people in terms of hygine so anything that got spilled on documwnts could easily be nlamed on them. Fax was popular for maybe 5-10 years but when it was first in used the crappy paper was often "transcribed" by gals in the the "typing pool". Huge waste of time and even the gals good at it knew it was huge duplication of effort.
2. Gossip was pretty much "word of mouth" ONLY and often transmitted semi-intentionally by secretarial staff. Gossip was NEVER typed out or even handwritten for any anyone to actual prove anything... No need to shred anything as most office paper was no recycled but burned / buried...
3. No such thing as Internet / google meant people would OFTEN "make $h1t up" and then when some one else would say "this is all B_77_sh1t" excuses we're often lame "I guess I misread what you were looking for..." or "huh, I think this was not routed properly, let me track down the correct report..." lots of "do over"
4. Largely more productive as rarely any need for a complete do over BUT the only time to catch up news was to take the physical daily paper into bathroom and "sit for a while" as no one would tolerate the kind of surfing to nes sites that EVERYONE does now... And if people that shop Amazon all day would have brought in a Sears catalog and thumbed through it all day they would have been fired. Even at Sears HQ... So there is sort of trade off of semi-unalertness which is offset by email 24x7 via smart phones...
And do NOT ask what smokers were like. Too gross to force myself to think about. Now the last time I had a boss that actually kept liquor in his desk and drank it is a different story...
Quote:
Originally Posted by TheoKel
I am 31 and work in a legal office, and I simply cannot imagine doing my job without the internet, especially email.
1. How did people send internal and external messages? Were you on the phone all day, or were fax and physical couriers the way to go?
2. Many of my coworkers use the company internet and their work emails for personal use and office gossip. Were phones and internal memos used the same way?
3. I can never tell my supervisor that I don't know something, because he will always tell me that the answer is on Google and I'm not trying hard enough. Before the internet, was "I don't know" a legitimate answer?
4. Do you feel that you've become more productive or less productive since having the internet at work?
I am 31 and work in a legal office, and I simply cannot imagine doing my job without the internet, especially email.
1. How did people send internal and external messages? Were you on the phone all day, or were fax and physical couriers the way to go?
2. Many of my coworkers use the company internet and their work emails for personal use and office gossip. Were phones and internal memos used the same way?
Larger companies had some forms of email for internal use since the 70s, but access was sometimes limited to IT staff or higher. I've always worked with it, even pre-internet boom days. But prior to that they used internal memo systems or even electronic dictation systems. I always thought the coolest thing was the old pneumatic tubes that would rocket messages through pipes in the building. Those had been around since the turn of the last century.
The thing I can't imagine living without is a word processor and a spreadsheet. Imagine having to type an entire page without making a single typo. I can type really fast, but I still screw up probably once every couple of lines. Screw up, type it all again. Yes, you can use whiteout, but that was only acceptable for rough drafts. Same goes for spreadsheets. Imagine budget time using paper ledgers and if you were lucky, desk calculators.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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We had email in the late 70s, it was an IBM mainframe application called PROFS. The biggest difference then was that applications lived on mainframes, with huge disk packs that took up
rooms, and held less data than the current laptops.
We had email in the late 70s, it was an IBM mainframe application called PROFS. The biggest difference then was that applications lived on mainframes, with huge disk packs that took up
rooms, and held less data than the current laptops.
Today's laptops exceed even somewhat recent mainframes. I remember the datacenter I worked at early 90s. It had about 100 gigs of storage that was scattered over rows and rows of 3380s. Everyone was super excited when we upgraded to two EMC disk arrays that had a whopping 300 gig of storage.
I remember standing around the water cooler talking gossip.
Watch the 1980 comedy movie called "9 to 5" starring Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda etc and you'll get the general idea of what happen before the internet!
So, before the Internet, office workers would kidnap their boss, chain him up in their basement, and take over the office?
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Whoa boy...
