I remember typing pools...

Summer of 1981, I wasn't even born ;)

Two things stick in my mind:

Letting the carriage of the typewriter knock my cup of coffee into a stack of newly-typed letters

and

a colleague being sent home to change having turned up in a divided skirt.

I forgot to mention the clatter of the telex machine which fought the dot matrix printer for airspace.  Fingers covered in ink from the carbon paper and later, the smell of thermal fax paper.

Then there was my first electric and subsequently electronic typewriter, which was way before I even saw a computer let alone used one!

Car phones like bricks (only the MD) and eventually one email address for the whole company.

Memories...

Proper typewriters, with carbon copies and that funny tippex paper.  I distinctly remember the ting of my typewriter and hitting the lever at the side to make it go down the page.  I tried to explain this concept recently to some 20 somethings in my team who all thought I was mad.

Annie - you made me laugh!

I remember posting press releases out to journalists, with only some of them willing to accept faxes.  And that was only 16 years ago.  I remember journalists shouting at us for emailing them (from the one computer in the office that had a communal email address).  And journalists used to attend press conferences in those days.  Oh and the lunches were very boozy if you went out with older journos, but the younger ones were always grateful if you just went for the mineral water - cos they still had an afternoon's work to do.

Now if I posted a press release to a journalist they'd think I was odd.  If I faxed it to them, the cleaners would put it in the bin a few days later.  Even when I started at the CIPD (8 years ago today) we still faxed all our press releases - and carted a fax machine up to Harrogate for the purpose.

But I've never worked in a smoking office.  Or had to do work on a manual typewriter.  (Although I have a colleague who shall remain nameless who hammers his keyboard like it was one - can't break the habit ... you can hear him on other floors!).

Loving the thread. And do read John's report that kicked it off.

Rob

My first job was an admin position using a manual typewriter, carbon paper and those funny bits of tippex paper that Gemma mentions.  The company was a food stores firm run by a family (Budgens if anyone remembers them) and lots of circulars, paperwork and other similar stuff were sent to the stores so there was always a last minute flurry with stuffing papers into pigeon holes.

As for email: during my first training role in 1994 my employer at that time was rolling out Lotus ccMail and everyone started to grapple with the concept of a message mysteriously disappearing into the ether before appearing on someone's screen.  One employee was totally unconvinced about the whole thing and told me she would still print out a copy of the message and pop it into the internal mail ...  Aaaaaaaaarrgh!

And one other thing which has changed altho' I'm deviating slightly - the nuisance factor of shops closing early on Wednesdays and NEVER being open on Sundays!  How did we cope?????  :-D

I too remember the manual typewriter, carbon paper.....and never mind the luxury of tippex and tippex paper....we had to use special typewriter erasers.  You certainly had to remember to put extra paper between your carbon paper and the paper underneath if you wanted to make a correction.

The day I left secretarial college was the day they got their first word processor....and it was a mammoth thing, with keyboard attached to the screen, but it was wonderful.  We only had a short demonstration, no time to use it.

Then in the world of work, yes the golf ball typewriter, then the daisy wheel.....then a sort of typewriter *** basic word processor, telexes sent to the telex room.  And then things got better.....no more carbon copies - photocopies instead, computers, emails, internet. No more shorthand......peeps responsible for their own correspondence (I still cringe when I see a letter incorrectly set out).   Ah the youth of today....they have it sooooo easy :)

Giving my age away - but my first job was sending & receiving  morse code messages in the RN. And this often meant copying them directly onto a typewriter. Thanks to the RN I'm a competent touh typist and still remember learrning to type to music in a class of twenty of us with 20 carriage returns clashing in unison.

Carbon paper  to duplicate and no tippex then.

Transmitters and receivers were  the size of domestic cookers and communications was often a trial and unreliable.

 The first 'mobile 'phone ' I saw was being used was in Scarborough by some guy with black curly hair and a shell suit - it must have been the size of the box they put fine whiskey in.  He was telling the other person that, "Yeh, I'm in Scarborough doing a bit of shopping".  

I probably only  dreamt you'd be able to stand in a street  one day and talk to someone else in another street, in some far off country, using something the size of a few business cards.