Cartoon - Unwinding the Clock of Innovation
Our poor ghost is a victim of stampeding innovation. Do you remember the days before PowerPoint, when presenters put transparencies under a gizmo with a bulb hot enough to fry an egg?
Other relics from the past …
1. The Telex machine. Used to transmit messages across wires, like a telegraph. We had one in our office. When it kicked in, it made the office sound like the old newspaper rooms you’d see in the movies.
2. Adding machines. When I joined the workforce, they looked like this, not like this. Not much computing power, and come to think of it not much styling, either.
3. The renowned Rolodex. No desktop was complete without one.
4. Phone booths. Now a curiosity, once an indispensable part of doing business. As a salesman, I remember spending hours looking for a phone to call the office for messages. On the south side of Chicago, where I spent much of my time, it wasn’t easy to find a phone booth in a safe spot. In rural areas, gas stations started featuring public phones you could reach from the driver’s seat of your car. I thought it was the most innovative achievement since The Beatles White Album.
5. The IBM Selectric. The granddaddy of electric typewriters. Easy to use and incredibly well engineered, Selectrics can still be found in service today. The chattering Selectric type balls used to provide a pleasant hum in the office which I found preferable to the muzak and white noise that replaced it.
6. Wite-Out. Office work would have come to a standstill without Wite-Out, the magic liquid paper that made typewriter corrections a relative snap. BIC is still trying to keep the venerable brand alive and rolled out new offerings as recently as 2002.
7. Slide rules. Not much hope of keeping slide rules alive. But I remember calling on engineering departments where senior engineers sat at their drafting tables manipulating slide rules like Jimi Hendrix on an electric guitar.
8. Letter boards. Pedestal or wall mounted, letter boards are still around, though not exactly the symbol of innovation. If you’re a salesman and spot one in the lobby, chances are good you’re not calling on Google.
What business relics do you remember?
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Carbon copy paper. . .flimsy. . .messy. . .gone the way of the dodo.
Good one, Erik. I used to work in a building that had been a carbon paper factory. If you leaned on a wall in the warehouse, you’d turn blue.
The MTST (magnetic tape selectric typewriter)…Don’t remember much about it, except that it was a monster. Learned to use it at my first office job as a “Girl Friday” for the Director of Group Marketing at New York Life’s home office in Manhatten, NY, quite a few years back!
What memories! (Still use White Out, though [is it really spelled without the “h”?]–or rather, Liquid Paper–but not for the same things! Usually use it for handwritten errors these days.)
I remember correction tape, though–the kind that had a chalky white coating on one side and had to be manually placed over the error and the error retyped over it to transfer the chalky substance to the paper and thus cover the error, so it could be corrected.
Things certainly have changed a lot since then!
Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
Jeanne