It’s funny because I used to work in an office supply store, and the owner brought down an ancient adding machine and I asked him the same question.
He proceeded to show me. “So much EASIER that these modern calculators” he said.
He proceeded to press buttons, pull levers, push levers, press more buttons to the point that I think that operating the Star Trek Enterprise would be easier. I still don’t know how they work.
Ah, memories. I brought my spindle from home to a new job in a low-income housing project. Boss suggested I take it back home. “Why?” “Because it makes a good weapon.”
Ditto on the ashtray. Other than that, the stuff on my desk didn’t change much in 40 years, except for replacing the typewriter with a keyboard, and the small pad of paper with Post-Its.
My father, who only retired last year at the age of 82, had a desk in a timewarp - I doubt it had changed since the 50s.
He had:
a notepad
a pen
a telephone
a roladex
an ashtray (up until about 10 years ago when he gave up)
and stacks of paper.
Typewriters, ‘adding machines’, computers and the like were for secretaries and ‘young people’. Oh, I think a calculator might’ve crept in there sometime in the 90s.
He was also the only person in the company still addressed ‘Mr SanVito’ rather than by first name. I think he would’ve liked ‘Sir’ if he could’ve got away with it.
No love for the two- or three-hole punch?
Born in 1949, I was a little kid through the 1950s. Dad owned the local Credit Bureau, and sometimes my brother and I would hang out in the office while Mom ran the Addressograph in the back and stuffed envelopes for the monthly advertising mailings and bulletins. The Addressograph was a big desktop machine that used stamped metal plates to kachunk out envelope addresses for the whole mailing list. One address per plate. You’d stack in a drawerful of plates, and put them back in the empty drawer as it kicked them back out. There was a mimeograph machine back there, too, for making big batches of copies.
Up front, two or three of the gals had those magnificent glass-sided Burroughs adding machines. They had rows and rows of number keys, and a big lever on the right side to make it all work.
All the typewriters were manual, not electric. One or two desks had the typewriter on a wonderfully sprung platform that would swing down into the left side of the desk when it wasn’t needed.
When my older brother was born, in January of 1948, Dad sent a “credit report” on the new “consumer”, with weight and length, to another office, using an electronic machine of some kind. This was wayy before the modern fax machine. Big bro still has the print.
Two more devices, and I can’t tell you when they came into use. One was a Dictabelt recording machine. Dad would orally speak a letter, and his secretary/office manager/genius would play back the belt to type the letter.
The other was an early copier called a Thermofax. The copies were faintly brown, and it wouldn’t copy blue ink. Many documents had to be sent back to be re-signed in black.
No, not the three-holer. That’s the only piece of office equipment that I’ve tossed at a wall.
The only ones that work are the big old heavy ones. The others have been crap for years. Not enough storage capacity, the holes aren’t big enough, they stick and jam. Awful things.
Ratchets and stuff inside. We had a comptometer in the computer room of my high school, and if you made it divide by 0 it would go into an infinite mechanical loop. Great fun!
Judging by the time it took to do a multiply, I’d guess that was done by repeated additions.
[quote=“nyctea scandiaca, post:2, topic:505388”]
I’m only 33, but I’ll take a guess… QUOTE]
Good list. I was working at a desk some 20 years before you were born, but you nailed it. Just about everything you listed was on my desk, plus heaps of folders and paperwork, and an In Basket. Man, wish I had a computer and email then.
Oh yeah, my tyupewriter was not on the desk, but on a tray that slid out of the desk and up to typng level.
Did you guys also have those giant mechanical check-writing machines? Punch in the date and amount, stick the check in, and then pull the lever to make it go KA-CHUNK?
I think my dad still has his in the storage room. 
I don’t know how much time we kids spent playing with that thing and scrap paper when we were tiny.
Adding machines are a whole different critter than calculators. My dad didn’t have one on his desk, they were pretty large, and mostly he did any math he needed to do either in his head, or on his blotter. He always had a nice blotter (that’s the big pad of paper), something like this. He very probably would have enjoyed this set if someone gave it to him.
I love to browse at Levenger’s, but man, I think their prices are way out of line. Unless I hit the Mega Super Duper Jackpot, which is very unlikely as I don’t gamble, unless my husband wants me to pick up a lottery ticket in hopes that I’ll have some luck…and he foolishly thinks that I would share with him. 
Dad had an adding machine that was used into the 90’s. You punched numbered buttons and pulled down the lever. There was a repeat button that would stop the buttons from clearing, so you could pull down the lever multiple times. Remember 3 times 4 equals 4 plus 4 plus 4. That would be punch down the 4 button and three pulls on the lever and a subtotal to pop the buttons back up and continue the tally. There was a paper roll for a print out.
Back at my first job, in 1982, I had a phone, a pencil cup, and a blotter.
Before that, at my college desks I had a blotter, a lamp, a pencil cup, my calculator, and a three-hole punch.
By the way, there were handy little hand-held calculators. I’ve still got a couple of them. not to mention a collection of slide rules.
I didn’t actually get a computer on my desk until circa 1990.
I had my first calculator in 1977. It had red led numbers and the the processes showed on the display as it ran. That was major cool.
They had grease pencils in at the shipping desk instead of today’s markers. They had chalk boards on the wall for scheduling and messages instead of the erasable white boards. People that had a desk job would often have carbon paper in a drawer so when they had to have multiple copies they didn’t have to hand write a bunch of copies. They would have had ink erasers and pencil erasers instead of white out. You might have found fountain pens and ink well on the desk. A personal fan would have been likely since most people didn’t have air conditioning. It would have been common to have an ash tray , and a box of cigars or cigarettes on the desk.
I started around 1970 and like Jabiru there was an ashtray.
Never a typewriter- there were typing pools and/ or typists for that.
IIRC, on my grandfather’s desk in the sixties (but likely not much changed for twenty years before that), there was an adding machine, a phone, a rolodex, several ledgers, a big receipt book, a large business-sized checkbook, hardbound catalogues from suppliers, a blotter, a spindle, an accounts payable tray, an accounts receivable tray, a pencil / pen cup, a desktop clock, a huge ashtray, a pipe rack and a small ocillating fan (with the necessary paperweights that went with it). There was a typewriter on a smaller table nearby and usually a serious mug of coffee on whichever desk he was working on at the moment.
This was for the family business run from the home and housed in a vintage oak roll top desk.
IN the desk, lower left bottom drawer - a bottle of Four Roses whiskey and a pair of rubbers to slip over the wingtips during inclement weather. On the desk, an old fashioned desk set, with a couple of non-working wood or brass pens sticking out of a matching stand.
Ooh! Just remembered going to my dad’s (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) office in the late 1960s, and playing with the rotating wire holder full of various rubberstamps. Good times. Still have his top-notch fingerprint magnifying glass on my desk at home.
I remember my dad using his dictaphone.
Although most people just used their finger.
Our secretary had an IBM word processor at my first job in the mid-70s. It was a golfball typewriter on a stand with a one-line editable display and the right side closed in to the floor to hold the tape reels. But we were advanced for the time because it was the computer department (one of the fastest in production, the Univac 418-3 with a whole 2MHz cycle speed originally designed for NASA message switching)
Paper weights.