How long a time was it from when virtually all business offices had typewriters to when virtually no business office had typewriters?
What were the approximate dates?
I’ll take a completely personal experience stab at it: I started in IT in 1989 at a large, 300+ bed hospital IT department. Back then the secretary still had & regularly used an IBM Selectric. That was probably finally replaced with an HP LaserJet & PC sometime in the late 90s. Windows 95 came out in 1995 (duh) and we waited a year or two to adopt it, so I’d say the Selectric was retired in 1996-97…
At this point, anyone with a working typewriter just has to be some sort of filthy hipster.
I advocate a house-to-house cleansing operation. Typewriter? Rifle butt to the jaw. Working typewriter? Automatic burst to the skull.
Typewriters were still routinely needed for some specialized forms in large offices up until the mid-90’s. You have to set your threshold for obsolete to get an exact answer but 1992 - 1996 is an approximate range when typewriters went from something that was simply more rare to an anachronism.
They still existed when I started professional work in 1997 in a few really specialized areas but were being phased out quickly. I haven’t seen one in use in more than a decade and I have worked for lots of major corporations.
We kept a typewriter around for envelopes, shipping labels and forms, especially the old-fashioned multi-carbon forms. Not sure when our office manager finally packed the last one away, but I’d guess around 1995.
The year 2000 was the last time I saw a typewriter in an office, kept just to deal with occasional multipart form. There was also an occasional check cut that was not on a typical sheet that could be passed through a printer. I think I saw it used a total of three times in a 2 year period.
Used some sort of electric typewriter when I worked in a little tiny law office for a short time in 2006. It was only for typing addresses on envelopes and filling in forms. My employer was a little cheap and behind the times: she made me go out and move her car a foot from the 90 minute parking space every so often, and she was one of the last offices in town where the employees could smoke cigarettes inside.
I can tell you that the Bangkok Post English-language newspaper did not get rid of its last typewriter until about a month ago, when long-time American journalist Bernard Trink, in his 80s now, stopped going into the office and now writes his book reviews from home. To this day, he still refuses to use a computer, or he did until someone showed him how to surf for porn. But that’s about all he’ll use a computer for.
By the late 80s, we had all stopped using typewriters and were using our big Wangs to type on instead (get your mind out of the gutter, it was a word processing system at the time). I’d say typewriters pretty much disappeared from the engineering offices I was familiar with in the mid 90s, along with secretaries. Every office I’ve worked in still had an old typewriter lying around just for things that needed it, such as forms that required a carbon copy. We still have one functional typewriter in the office I work in now, though it is very rarely used. It’s in the accounting part of the building, and is used for certain forms.
The offices I worked in with the State of Florida still had them when I left last year, stuck away here and there. Believe it or not, certain government forms exist only in hard copy, even now, and once in a while one had to be filled in.
There is one typewriter in my office and when she bangs on it I wax nostalgic.
Disclaimer: I work in a government office.
The Wangs of the 1980’s were pretty large and heavy compared to today, and very rigid and inflexible. If a girl was hit by one of those old Wangs it would knock her out completely.
Our office got its first computer (and a honking massive HP laserjet) around 1985, but only one. We set up a student lab in 1987 (with exactly one 20 MB hard drive and every student was limited to 10K storage) and I guess the department had computerized the office by the early 90s. There is still one typewriter in the office. I don’t know how often it is used.
As recently as 1992, my wife worked in a translation office that didn’t allow the translators to have their own computers, although the typists did. She had to translate into a dictaphone, get it typed, mark errors by hand, get it corrected. repeat until she gave up. “I pay translators to translate and typists to type”, the owner/boss said. He could never understand how inefficient the operation was.