Sometimes in old films, photographs or TV shows they show an office building with large rooms stuffed with people at their desks. In another thread a doper mentioned the term Steno Pool. I know they were office workers in the past and I always wondered about the large numbers of people working at desks in business offices in the 40s-60s. What were they all doing, did computers replace them?
Steno is short for stenographer, aka, someone who writes shorthand, aka, a secretary.
Think about how many times you make a change to a report or letter. Back then they had no word processors so every change to a report or letter had to have at least have one page retyped in full.
That’s what the stenos did. They took dictation to start the process and then retyped for changes.
no computer storage so most businesses kept important information on paper and in file cabinets - file clerks
No automatic phone switching or dedicated phone numbers so - Local operator.
No phone message recording so - Secretaries
Yep, pretty much replaced by computers.
Typing wasn’t a skill which most men (and especially businessmen) thought worth learning. That’s what they had the typing pool for.
You either dictated a letter or wrote it out in your own handwriting. Dictation could be with the steno sitting next to you and taking shorthand, or you could record on a tape-recorder which the typist could play back. And if the typist/steno made mistakes in the first draft, you corrected the mistakes by hand, and the letter was retyped.
When the first wordprocessors were developed, they were mostly used by typists, but they saved a lot of their effort in retyping drafts.
And yes, you expected that a typist could type whole pages without making any mistakes!
Hand and hand with this, it’s surprising, at least to me, to see how many historical documents from WWI have pen and ink corrections. I seem to remember seeing Truman’s approval for dropping the atomic bomb having some pen and ink changes. You’d think that a document having that much historical significance would be retyped, but it wasn’t.
Recall also that there were no photocopiers, so if that memo had to go to ten people…
Well, the was carbon paper and it larger offices there were spiffy typewriters that could make many copies at once.
But if you had to send stuff to more than a couple dozen people it could get hairy.
I wonder how many young people don’t know what “cc” and “bcc” actually used to stand for.
Mimeograph machines were still in use to make multiple copies when I was in grade school. Running the machine was one of the classroom chores kids used to actually volunteer to do.
And they had a pool for efficiency - if you were upper management you certainly had your own secretary. If you were an accountant and you needed to create a memo, you’d call down to the pool to have someone sent to you to take your memo and type it.
Uh, not really. For short runs you could just run a mimeograph. Larger companies had in house small print shops or contracted print work out. I knew linotype operators who spent years doing this kind of work.
An old engineer I worked with long ago once told me that (at least some of) the women in the steno pool at an un-named Long Island airplane manufacturer had, ahem, other duties, which he implied were associated with getting contracts.
My first job was typing insurance policies. There were the original and seven carbon copies, and each one had to be typed perfectly. No strikeouts or corrections, and this was before the age of Liquid Paper.
I became a good typist doing that.
Well hell, you sure shrouded this in mystery, didn’t you.
Wow, they were pretty progressive for back then, having women in Sales and all…
So, for that matter, does the US Declaration of Independence.
Well, they didn’t have a steno pool then.
Even in the late 90s I taught Word etc to older businessmen who had been told in college that there wasn’t any real point to their learning to type (or at least this was the silent assumption). They would come to class and have not only very little idea about how Word worked, but how to use a keyboard. They were now being expected to fill out reports on the plane with the laptop and email them in the morning, post haste. They were a bit lost.
Dictation also hasn’t fully gone out of style—my father is a radiologist and he dictates diagnoses into a microphone which is then machine-transcribed, but looked over by a human transcriptionist, too. (If you’re wondering why the doctors don’t type it out themselves, they really just do not have enough time: they tend to be swamped at certain times of the day, anyway, and so more doctors would have to be hired to do it. Transcriptionists are a lot cheaper than doctors.) So while computers have streamlined the process, it’s not completely gone.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
ETA: Can someone point out a correction on the Declaration of Independence? I want to see it!
Originally it said “life, liberty, and the pursuit of a penis”