Technology Way Back in the Dark Ages

I read Bluesleepy's blog this morning and she was writing about technology today and wondering how we ever got along before the days of cell phones and computers. It seems everyone is "plugged in" at all times these days.

That brought to mind all the business classes that I took in high school - among them were typing and shorthand - two necessities for women at that time who were planning on going into the business world. Back in the "Dark Ages" we were called secretaries and we weren't ashamed of it. Now they're called administrative assistants, as though the title secretary is something to be looked down upon. In most instances it wasn't the boss who ran the office, it was the secretary who saw to it that everything ran like clockwork. A good secretary could make her boss shine and in many cases she was the reason he got all those promotions that he did.

Anyway, I digress. Back to typing class.



The teacher (Miss Ronsberg) who taught both typing and shorthand was a bit on the outdated side. This was in the 60's, but she dressed like a Gibson Girl from back around the turn of the century. She wore her hair in an upswept fashion with all the ruffled "waists" as she called them. She wasn't as pretty as the Gibson Girl below though. I think she was about 95 years old (snicker) and had to weigh in at about 250 pounds. She was not petite by any means.

We learned on manual typewriters - you know the ones where you would reach the end of the line and have to lift your left hand off the keyboard, hit the return lever and start on the next line again. We had to have strong fingers back then to hit the keys hard enough to make the imprint on the paper. I couldn't do it today because my hands have become pretty wimpy from just using a computer keyboard.

She would walk up and down the rows when we were being given timed tests with her yardstick. You were taught proper posture, which was to sit straight in your chair without leaning against the back, ankles together and feet flat on the floor. That's where the yardstick came in - if you weren't sitting properly you would get whacked across the shins with the edge of the yardstick. Ouch!! It sometimes even left black and blue marks.

Because I was a good student I eventually got to use the one and only electric typewriter in the classroom. But even that didn't make correcting errors any easier. We had things called correcting tape and whiteout. But we also had to learn to use a typewriter eraser, which could really make a mess on your original if it wasn't clean. And then think of making multiple copies and having to correct the error several copies down. Ugh.

The IBM Selectric was a miracle typewriter because it gave you the option of being able to change fonts by removing and inserting a new ball on a peg, which would spin around to the appropriate letter and leave that imprint on the paper.

When I got my first job I thought I had died and gone to heaven because I worked on a self-correcting IBM Selectric. It had a spool of correct-tape that you inserted from one side, through the area where the ball hit the paper and then wound itself onto a spool on the other side of the carriage. If you made an error you hit a certain button on the keyboard and the typewriter would backup a space, remember the letter that had been imprinted, hit that letter on top of the correct-tape and leave a blank space. Then all you had to do was insert the correct letter. This was fine for the original, but you still had to weed through all the copies and correct them manually.

At the point in time when I worked Federal Civil Service up in Iceland every document that I prepared had to have an original and 8 copies. Each copy was a different color designating which department it went to and was made of a thin tissue-like paper which made corrections difficult because it was easy to erase right through the paper.

At one point in time I worked as the secretary for the president of a life insurance company. That was my first contact with computers in the office environment. The secretaries were all still using typewriters, but all the billing was done on a computer that filled an entire room, and hummed along like it was ready to take off into outer space. We named this monstrosity Big Bertha, and when she malfunctioned the entire office was in a panic because we then had to prepare 20,000 billing statements by hand. Regardless of what your position was, you prepared statements.

This is Bertha being repaired. It could sometimes take days.

My first personal experience in the office world with a computer was when I worked in the Placement Office of a local college. When Lovely Daughter started school the school systems were teaching computers and were using the Apple IIC, so we bought one for her to use at home. This little toy cost over $2000 at that time. And about all it was good for was playing games and writing letters. Now you can buy a laptop with a many-gig hard drive and lots of other bells and whistles for $700. My how times have changed.

So here I am, dumped into an office environment with a PC that I knew nothing about. I was absolutely certain that if I touched the wrong key that everything on the hard drive would disappear. What a relief to discover that wouldn't happen.

So through the years I progressed up the learning curve to today. Now I copy movies onto DVD, I'm currently digitizing all of our old LPs (that's the old 33 1/3 record albums for those of you who are to young to remember what an LP is) and burning them to CDs, all my photos are digital and stored on CDs, along with personal records and documents being scanned into the computer and stored. When I think of how productive we actually were before the age of computers I am truly amazed. Now I suffer withdrawals whenever mine goes down.

Psssst: Just as an aside, at one point in my career when I worked for a court reporter I could type 120 wpm and take shorthand at 150 wpm.