A nostalgic look at office technologies of the ’80s and ’90s: grab your Rolodex, prime your pager and light up your OHP!
The ’80s and ’90s saw a revolution in the way we worked, with the dawning of a digital revolution where we ditched the typewriter and dialled up the internet. It was the start of an always-on culture that tied us to standard office hours and locations to access physical data, facilities and colleagues. Let’s take a trip down memory lane to visit these halcyon days… the stuff of dreams or perhaps nightmares, depending on your perspective!
The revolutionary IBM PC (with a fraction of the power of an iPhone)
In 1981, the IBM PC came to market – a machine which was so commercially successful that the designation “personal computer” came to be generic. Whilst its 16Kb of RAM sounds piffling today (you’d need half a million original IBM PCs to match a contemporary iPhone’s computing power), in a world of typewriters and mainframes it caused an office revolution. Although individual computer desktops removed the need for as much paper storage, floppy disks were still vital for loading programmes and data.
Windows and other operating systems were still a decade away from mass usage, so you had to grab a coding book in order to make use of the new space-age tech
Who remembers Script and (S)GML – the Generalized Markup Language which enabled you to format word processed documents on the PC? If you’d like a trip down memory lane, here’s a link to the original 1978 manual! It was still in use in the 90s. Luckily for the less tech-minded among us, computers became exponentially cheaper and faster over the following 15 years, spelling doom for the typewriter and word processor.
Rolling with the Rolodex
Unlike the typewriter, the Rolodex maintained its relevance into the new millennium, being so vital to 1980s commercial success that some companies resorted to lawsuits to try and recover their precious Rolodexed contacts from ex-employees! In a world before the smartphone contacts list, the simple efficiency of the Rolodex was ingenious: this circular cardholder to alphabetise your connections ruled the roost throughout the 80s and early 90s. Rolodex has entered all the mainstream dictionaries as an accepted term and you can still buy one today on Amazon if you choose! As late as 2014, business management expert Tom Peters famously said ‘You are your Rolodex, breadth matters.’
The fatness of your Rolodex may have been a sign of a thriving business network, but the ’80s also saw a greater intrusion of work beyond the office. The pager kept you tied to your employment wherever you were, with intrusive bleeps and enigmatic 120-character messages, if you were lucky enough to be issued with an alphanumeric pager, rather than just a numeric one that gave you a number to call… from the nearest landline, naturally! The pager was a vibrating badge on your belt, its insistent tones telling the world you were indispensable!
Wire-free communication came with beeps and bricks
The pager drove the working world into an always-on future, assisted by car phones which made every journey an office opportunity: their piercing antennas projected from sleek company cars, status symbols that steered us towards multimedia social connectivity. In the 1990s, the Ford Mondeo (billed as the first “world car”) gained a popularity boost in corporate fleets by offering a free brick-sized Motorola handset with every purchase. The first commercial mobile phone was released in 1983, yet it would take nearly 20 years for mobiles to meet the masses. In 1997, only 1 in 5 households in the UK had a mobile.
40 years ago, before dial-up screeched through the landlines of the 90s, allowing us to post our electronic mail, the 1980s saw the facsimile or ‘fax’ machine whirr and whine into office life. In comparison to email, there were limitations, such as the lack of privacy in document exchanges, with many machines located in public areas. There was the difficulty of changing a slippery fax roll, making today’s challenge of changing ink-jet printer cartridges seem trivial, along with the frustration of finding the paper had run out and dozens of messages mangled or lost. Interestingly enough, despite the overwhelming convenience of digitised images and messages, fax machines still prevail in some offices and markets: in Japan a quarter of households still have a fax machine, according to 2023 data!
Data and slide decks the old-fashioned way
Even if you managed to conquer the fax machine, visualising your data, and presenting it to the board necessitated the gruelling task of creating slides for the overhead projector (OHP). You’d need coloured permanent OHP pens, text and symbol stencils and a pack of clear acetate slides. If you were lucky, you might have access to a PC programme like Lotus Freelance Graphics or Harvard Graphics, and a plotter with pen cartridges: it could take 10 minutes to print each slide! You had to be careful when changing the slides, as they’re easy to smudge and impossible to correct or update! Switching on the OHP machine could easily blow a bulb and perhaps a fuse – the well-prepared presenter always carried a spare! Fiddling with the focus to get a perfect image the right way up on a wall or screen was a fine art!
Need more data for your next presentation? Back then you would open up a filing cabinet, or perhaps ask your secretary or assistant to help you – an almost unheard of luxury these days! Or you might grab some microfiche sheets and take them across to the microfiche reader – this durable technology is still used today for archive records in some record-keeping functions and libraries!
This was the working world of the ’80s and ’90s, a place stuck between the analogue era and the modern world. It feels a long time ago, as we join the latest Teams call, fire off a WhatsApp and sign into complex office systems wherever we are using two factor authentication on the mobile in our pocket. Do you remember any exciting or trying experiences from the digital dark ages? Were they better or worse times? Let us know by emailing team@compincent.com – we’d love to share your reminiscences in a future blog.