Most of you know that I write a hefty number of letters each and every week. These letters have evolved over the years. In a thumbnail sketch, I write (1) old people; (2) sick people; (3) young people; (4) relatives; and (5) just because letters. I average six letters a week. I usually try to write using a different letter font each week just for the fun of it. This week I chose the Courier font, and it took me back almost 50 years.
When I got out of college (May, 1971), the first question asked of any woman was, "How fast can you type?" Didn't matter if you had a degree or not. Women were secretaries. Men may have started in the mail room, but women started in the typing pool.
My first real job was at a one man law office, and I got the job because I could type. The typewriter of choice was the IBM Selectric II. It cost $620 - equivalency today $3,150 
IBM premiered the first Selectric machine in 1965. It had 2800 parts, and it took seven years to develop. It became the best selling typewriter in history capturing 75% of the American typewriter market at its peak. There were two instantly apparent differences from a regular electric typewriter: First, there were no keys. Instead there was the golf ball. Courier font was the 'default' ball.
Second, if you look closely at the typewriter picture, you can see a little "x" hanging off the end of the space bar - that's the correcting feature. You could use it to backspace over a typing error and retype.
These were both amazing improvements in the typing world. Most typewriters using typing keys had a realistic speed of about 50 words per minute while an IBM Selectric could easily be typed at 90 words per minute. The very first woman I worked with at my tiny law office had been a legal secretary for 40 years, and she could type at a blinding rate of speed on a Selectric. My all time high was about 70 words per minute on a good day, and I availed myself 100 times more of the correcting feature on the Selectric than the real legal secretary. Hand in hand with the Selectric typewriter came the small office Xerox machine.
Prior to both of these machines, in a typical office, everything which needed to be typed was sent to the Typing Pool, and the Typing Pool Supervisor parceled out the work to the typists. In a law office, everything was typed in triplicate - one original and two carbons. You loaded one page of stationery, a piece of erasable carbon paper, another piece of stationery, a second piece of erasable carbon paper and a third piece of stationery. For every typing error, you had to carefully white out your error on the topmost piece of stationery, erase the error on the other two pieces of stationery, realign the paper and carbon sheets, backspace and type over your error. Fun times! You can see why a legal secretary who could type fast and make very few errors was in great demand. I was not that person.
With the advent of the IBM Selectric II, you had one piece of stationery - period. You could back up and the incorrect letters would magically lift off the page. Then, you just retyped. Instead of carbons, you made Xerox copies. Affordable copy machines were just coming into small offices at the time. Xeroxing was one of the first of the new electronic words, and it didn't matter what the brand of copy machine your office had - you still Xeroxed. One of my first 'assignments' beyond typing and answering the phone was to evaluate a half a dozen copy machines in order for the boss (our one lawyer) to pick one for our office to buy.
The IBM Selectric II which premiered in 1973 had an 8000 character memory function making this groundbreaking piece of equipment the first desk top machine with a memory function. Prior to the IBM Personal Computer which included 'Word', a word processing application which had a cut and paste function, everything was 'typed' on a typewriter. Keyboarding was a function of key punch operators who used keyboards to type onto paper punch cards - a machine hooked up to a keyboard which literally punched holes into the cards. These cards with holes were the programs fed into huge room sized computers.
Drake as an early Data Processing Manager in the 1970's, had three groups of people reporting to him: (1) the people who managed and maintained the hardware - the actual computer in an air conditioned room, sealed to keep dust out, and on a raised floor to let air circulate. (2) the programmers who wrote computer programs for office functions and (3) the typing pool and the key punch operator pool. As he put it, group (3) was a manager's nightmare. The typing pool fought with the engineers (his company was a small engineering company) over how long it would take to turn around work, and the key punch operators fought among themselves. He was thrilled when under a re-organization the third group was whisked out from under him.
This must seem like a 'when I was a kid I had to walk five miles in the snow to school' type memory. However, I was in my early 20's and starting my working career. The idea that any manager/engineer/accountant would 'type' anything was unthinkable. Even into the 1990's, there were specialized people inside companies whose jobs were to manipulate the new desk top electronic machines to produce a finished project proposal with charts, graphs, color, and other embedded bells and whistles.
My dinky little one man law firm was an early adopter of technology. We had keyboards interfaced with magnetic card readers (initially) which morphed into the 6" floppy disks, which morphed into the 4" floppy disks. Permanent storage was on a hardware disk about 20" in diameter which had to be manually removed and replaced with another hardware disk to get a 'back up' of our work product. I don't even remember how much memory these cumbersome disks contained.
This primitive system cost $50,000 in the late 1970's. Our lawyer was a figure of ridicule for spending that kind of money. (That would be about a $250,000 expenditure in today's money.) It wasn't long before we had the last laugh. Within a couple of years, lawyers would routinely arrive at our door asking for a 'tour', or a 'presentation', etc. of our equipment. That quickly became another one of my jobs.
Document production went from typewriters with stationery and carbon paper (prior to 1973) to IBM Selectric Typewriters routinely paired with Xerox machines, (circa 1975) to desktop computers, (1980s) to handheld computers (2007) That all happened in a timeline of about 35 years. Furthermore, the rate of change is continuing to accelerate as we move deeper into the Electronic Revolution. The virus which has upended our lives is pushing the business envelope and due to our smart machines, which allow us to interface on multiple levels, the necessity of the physical work place in 2020 is being questioned in the same way as the necessity of carbon paper in the 1980's.
2 comments:
loved your story. Its my story too. I learned to type when I was 13. I was chosen to be the editor of the junior high yearbook because I could type! 1970!. I took every class there was from steno to data processing-word processing-even learned "Basic". Tried a few other programming functions but I've always like typing and filing! My sis in law was a computer programer for EDS. Her dad was a partner with Ross Perot! She still does office work but is an Exec. I loved my IBC selectric. I liked the one in the church office! I had to stand up because it sat on a board above the sink! But like you said, copy machines took over and now you send stuff directly to it. I hated loading envelopes in a puny little printer. But that's how we did it. Of course labels helped with that. I never have worked in a big corporation. I've done temp work for years so I had many varied jobs.... security reports for a bank, flight papers for a simulator company at DFW, medical work. I was a guinea pig for IBM in Westlake. I think we were testing windows? (this was the 80's). I've been watching the NASA channel on you tube. The guys just climbed into the space station. I saw it! They have cameras everywhere! I used to dial a rotary phone!!!!! Now I can watch astronauts on the space station!!! Amazing technology. Betty
Betty, your story just reinforces how electronics have transformed the work place in an amazingly short space of time. I always marvel that my grandfather entered Oklahoma in a covered wagon, and he lived to see a man walk on the moon!
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