What’s obsolete and what’s not these days

Working in an office 30 years ago was vastly different from what it’s like now. In fact, working in one 30 years ago was hugely different from working in one in the 60s and 70s! In the 60s and 70s there were no computers and the one sound you could hear when walking into any office was the unison tapping of the typewriter keys by rows upon rows of female clerks. They had reams of paper, an in-tray, an out-tray and correction fluid to rectify mistakes during the typing process.

This was also the case in the early 80s because computers had not been introduced into the workplace until the late 80s, that is, as far as I can recall. Computers first came with a floppy disk drive but then were replaced with a flash drive, or memory stick, and these are now replaced with the cloud. The cloud or Google drive is something I’m not too keen on. If you think about it, how safe is your information on these really? I assure you, it’s not up in a cloud. I started working in 1989 and although I’d seen computers in the university’s ‘computer room’ (yes, that’s what it was called back then), the first time I actually saw one in use in an office was in 1989 and it didn’t come with Windows or Word. And since the computer, we also seem to have done away with a Rolodex, the icon of the 80s, diaries and Filofaxes, also icons of the 80s, and physical calendars, for the most part.

I can tell you that the most exciting part of ringing in the New Year was getting diaries at work. In one place I worked in the UK, two diaries were offered, a desk one plus a pocket one for managers to take to meetings. Syncing both was something I tried to do but it was always challenging.

Now I challenge you to find a diary with ease. Anyone recording appointments now does it on Google Calendars on their device or computer both of which are automatically synced unless you tell it otherwise.

The computer has become the most powerful tool since the internet because now we no longer need a fax machine, a piece of electric hardware that sat in everyone’s office. Designed to send and receive documentation there and then but perish the thought that the recipient’s machine had run out of paper or, worse, he forgot to plug it in! Other than the fax, we communicated by picking up the landline which, although is still around, it isn’t really used to get in touch with people anymore. Now you either WhatsApp them, email them, ring their mobile from your mobile or you video conference with them no matter where in the world you both might be.

But when the internet wasn’t that widely used and few people had mobiles, doctors and employees who spent a lot of time out of the office were issued with pagers which are probably now sitting in the museum of electronic arts (I just made that up).

Walk back in time and you will see filing cabinets up to the ceiling housing documents going back decades. Of course, now they’ve all been digitised. Some folk think that you’d be hard-pressed to find a stapler or a hole-puncher now but I don’t think that’s the case. I still think both of these items have their uses today. You can still buy printer paper and a printer because many entities still need them as part of their core process.

Legal documents, for example, need to be printed and signed. Degrees need to be printed and signed before being awarded to students and let’s not forget paper for artists to paint and draw on. Watercolour paper is either bound, stapled or glued down. Its cover is printed with a design. This also goes for watercolour paints. They come in both tubes and pans and each pan is individually wrapped in paper that’s the colour of the paint and printed with its information which means a printer is also needed. So you see, although many things are now obsolete, there are some that are essential, like paper for example.