A printer used to be an occupation not a machine. The redefinition of the word sums up the current state of the profession.
I read a federal employment survey a year or so ago that essentially said there was no longer a need for anyone to learn to become an accountant. The current amount of accountants could handle all the work that existed and the projected future amount of accounting work was diminishing faster than accountants were retiring.
Little Nemo - my brother is a Printer. He runs a very large CMYK Color Separation printer for a small, specialized publication company. So they still exist in some capacity.
Are there still people in the drafting profession? Or have CAD programs taken over completely?
How about typesetters? Don’t newpapers use Desktop Publishing for everything these days?
Telegraph operators?
Telegram delivery boys?
Just thought you’d like to know that in India, the majority of buildings (residential, as well as commercial) that have elevators (we call them lifts) have an elevator operator (we call him lift man). This includes elevators that have automatic doors. I think it’s one of the most redundant jobs in the world, but lift men are everywhere here (I guess hiring lift men has more to do with economic/population reasons, rather than operational reasons)
Very true … and he worked for my one of the firms I worked at.
Except to be honest, he had a bit of modern flair as he used a Mayline (a parallel ruler) instead of a T-Square.
As a newspaper man, boy, heck I’m just a photog…I know of no newspapers that still use lead typesetting. The old few timers that we still have working all do color negative separations. So they still have jobs, but their original jobs have long since been eliminated by computers.
…That’s the only one I can think of.
As far as I’m aware, the situation is the same in Australia, but it is even in danger of going one step further, and having lighthouses (even fully automated ones) eliminated completely. As much as ten years ago, my sailing instructor told me that much as going to sea without a two way radio is considered highly careless (and probably illegal in many cases), the same attitude would prevail in the near future with regard to GPS. If every last vessel off the Australian coast has a GPS system, there would be no need for the government to maintain expensive lights. So this guy said, anyway.
And the lift / elevator situation here as far as I’m aware is that certain snooty department stores keep their lift drivers (as we call them), as part of the stores’ image. They are usually elderly gentlemen in immaculate uniforms who have worked at the store for fifty years, and are very charming to the blue rinse set. “Fourth floor! Haberdashery, children’s wear… thank you Madam… Going UP!” Some of the lifts are still manual, and have a big polished brass lever which the driver operates proudly (and these lifts always heave up and down a little as they stop). Glass doors too, so you can see the liftwell whizzing by - was great when I was a kid.
Other Jobs I don’t think have been mentioned yet:
Guard/brakeman on freight trains. Replaced by the “End of Train Device”.
Ticketwriters: My stepfather is a signwriter (which is a job itself in danger), but also used to do “ticketwriting”, usually temporary signs on card saying things like “Win this car! Five Dollars to Enter” in awful day-glo paint of the sort they use to write “Merry Xmas” on supermarket windows. That stuff is all done now by anybody with a computer and no special skill. When I worked at a department store, they had a whole section dedicated to this work. I’d be surprised if it still exists.
I posted this in a similar thread several months back, but it fits in well here:
Many years ago, in high school, I worked at an outfit that did electronic drafting. I was pretty much a gofer, changing the ammonia in the blueprint machine and so forth.
There was a fellow there named Glenn who was the center of the whole operation. He designed circuit boards. He would gaze at a schematic with several dozen chips on it for days. Suddenly, he would pick up a double-ended red/blue pencil and begin drawing the actual paths that the foil would follow on the finished circuit board. It was an amazing talent he had: imagine, figuring out how to get thousands of connections where they need to go, without crossing each other, in two dimensions with minimal “feed-throughs” (little holes that connect the top to the bottom). Once he finished, two women would make photo-ready masters of the boards using red and blue cellophane tape on clear plastic, based on his red and blue pencil lines and the masters would be sent off to the print shop to be photographed.
I haven’t even been remotely close to that industry since I left there after high school, so I don’t know how this work is done today; I can only imagine that companies are probably dumping $30K down on a fancy software package that does all of the work that Glenn did, only faster and more accurately.
Boy I hope he migrated to some more open-ended field.
travel agents will soon be going the way of the light house keepers, I am certain.
Three relatively obscure jobs that are probably almost entirely gone because of the computer:
Photostat camera operator
Distortion table operator
Film strippers
A photostat camera is a specialized camera used to enlarge and reduce type and black and white images for printing. It was (or is, if any are still floating around) a very large machine, generally about five feet high and a yard square. The Mac blew that one right out of the water.
Much more obscure was the distortion table, a device that used a complicated system of levers and a moving platform to expose a negative in such a way that the positive image could be distorted in one dimension but not another (something distortion cameras could not do). But something much less expensive, much more multi-purpose computers could do much better.
Film strippers cut patterns in amberlith and rubylith (red and orange films mounted on a clear acetate backing) with exacto knives to create special effects for print for multiple exposures (on a stat camera). Their services were very much in demand for most print jobs. Obviously, another vanished or nearly vanished profession thanks to computers.
A small agency wouldn’t need these people, but a medium-sized printing firm or a type house often did. Well, except for the distortion table, that was a pretty narrow niche even before computers.
Editors at publishing houses have been greatly reduced in number, as a lot of publishers have found it economically convenient to believe that spell-checking and grammar-checking software can replace editors. If you read a lot, you know the real answer to that question.
Some of these people migrated into computer graphics, but not all of them did.
More or less. There are CAD programs where the operators sit, place the parts, and draw the traces all on the computer. Then when it’s finished, the cad files are emailed off to the fab houses. No more transparancies involved, but there are still people who do the actual board layout, only on the computer. I’m one of them.
Remember when every item had to have the price stamped on it?
paste up artist…
one of my first jobs out of art school was pasting up page layouts for text books. we had sixteen people who applied wax to the back of typeset copy and pasted up the textbook pages.
it was a t-square, drawing board kind of thing. all done by computers now.
Despite having the (deserved) reputation of being the Kingdom of Technology, Japan still has plenty of the above two.
If you know how to use it, an abacus is actually faster than a calculator for some operations - one of the tellers at my bank is quite proficient with hers and it’s quite impressive to see how fast she can add up numbers. That being said, it’s true that even here, this abacus is a waning art.
There are lift operators in most large department stores. They press the buttons and call out the floor numbers, bowing when passengers get on and off. Quite possibly the most boring job in the world.
I’m in marine design, and while I use a workstation almost exclusively, we stll have a few pen & ink men, and a lot of pencil sketching goes on, too. But most of thatis maintenance of old drawings. It’s cheaper than moving them into CAD.
I still do a bit of pencil work, and I still use slide rules. What a freak, eh?
I have seen no evidence of this. We (and every other magazine in our company) still uses copy editors and proofreaders (although jobs have been combined due to other economic issues–nobody hires a full-time “proofreader” here; everyone does a little of this and a little of that). My sister’s in book publishing, and they still have copy editors there, too. I don’t think any pros expect spell/grammar checks to be the last word, so to speak.
Door to door hardcover encyclopedia salesmen?
This still exists! My wife works in the printing industry, and traditional paste-up is still alive and well in many parts of the country. Many small newspapers around the nation still paste up at least part of the newspaper (classifieds, directories, etc), or in some cases all of it.
Many print shops owned by the older generation have also been reluctant to switch over to computers, preferring to paste up text and manually strip everything together (opaque tape & pens, anyone?) I even know of one print shop that still operates a linotype, and does daily printing of obituaries on letter-press printers.
All in all, I’d say the print industry has been slow to adopt computers across the board. It is heading in that direction more and more every day, but there’s still a few holdouts floating around out there.
B
I don’t think anybody mentioned computers. Before the electronic computer came into use in the 1950s a computer was a PERSON who performed calculations!
Rufus:
This is nonsense as anyone can tell you. Accountants have not spent any time actually adding or subtracting in decades. An accountant’s job is a matter of classiffying and deciding which things go where. The notion that a machine can do an accountant’s job is ludicrous. There may be a glut of accountants but if this is the case it has little to do with computers.