A thread of old-fashioned office procedures no longer used

[Beach Hut]

Getting high on Tippex Thinner solution

 

[Lord Bracknell]

Gestetner machines.

In the days when photocopiers were something you saw on Tomorrow's World, your average office clerk had to make up a template and send it to the printing office whenever more than a couple of copies of a document were needed. Bear in mind that this template couldn't contain errors and had to be produced with a manual typewriter...never a favourite job.

Errors WERE possible. They were corrected with that pink sticky fluid stuff that glue sniffers loved.

 

[Lord Bracknell]

Desks without computers. Whole buildings without computers. Telephones with dials. Extension numbers. Card index systems. A bloke who REPAIRED calculators when they broke. A photocopier that caught fire when too many copies were made. The geezer in the next room who kept the history of the organisation's business in his head, but never wrote anything down. An hour for lunch, whether you wanted it or not.

 

[Gully]

Errors WERE possible. They were corrected with that pink sticky fluid stuff that glue sniffers loved.

Ooooh, I had forgotten that stuff...but bear in mind that the last time I made one of those things was almost 25 years ago!

 

[Herr Tubthumper]

I used to get Luncheon Vouchers when I first started working properly in '92.

 

[bhaexpress]

Punch girls ... who used to do all data entry, copying it from hand written entries on green lined sheets of paper. Twice, to make sure the data was accurately transcribed.

And they used to be forced to take regular breaks, during which they sat around in a circle ... knitting.

The process you refer to is called validation, The punch cards would be typed twice to ensure that the correct character had been typed. If the combination was wrong the card would be rejected when it went through the card reader. The wrong hole would be covered by s small plastic label. The problem was that if the label was nit fully on the card would get jammed in the reader and in fact would cause a 'wreck' where several cards for get torn up. Anybody who's had to dig bits of ripped card out of a reader will know what I mean.

Talking of floppies, the media that replaced the punch card, the 8" floppy disk, not many will remember them. When PCs arrived the floppies 5 and and quarter and then three and a half inched. Of course there was also the Zip disk but not many will remember them.

Oh, the company computer would be locked in a room were only authorised personnel would be allowed and it had air conditioning, smoke and fire detection and CO2 or Halon gas extingishers. There would be oxygen masks and tanks around the walls. The computer itself might have taken up the space of a basketball court but in fact an Iphone would be far more powerful.

 

[bhaexpress]

Tea ladies.

 

[Super Steve Earle]

also-

dictating letters for / copping off with someone from the 'typing pool', in any large firm..

internal mail system

petty cash / written memo's

We still have internal mail

 

[Beach Hut]

Snogging etc in the filing room

 

[Art Vs Science]

Widespread Racism and Sexism.......I think the process was called working, or some such proletarian-esque type activity you low level types do

 

[Lady Whistledown]

Diet Coke breaks.

 

[Gwylan]

this is brilliant, obviously none of you work in a solicitors office- we still do ALL of these!!

You still use typewriters and carbon paper!?

 

[timbha]

having to press A or B to get a telephone line, and waiting for the light to go out indicating one of the lines was free.

ash trays on every desk

Having to call your 28 year old boss Mr........

being shown the office/company VDU

calculators with till/tally rolls

lunchtime drinks and darts league

 

[RexCathedra]

Used to work in a glasshouse (time-share computation center) where all the input was boxes of punch cards, and all the output was 17"-wide green-and-white barred paper from page printers the size of a spinet. The only keyboard and monitor, the only real-time anything, belonged to The Guy from IBM who was seconded to us from Poughkeepsie. Had those tape drives right out of Bond movies.

 

[HovaGirl]

Getting out a floppy disk to back up your work.

Remembering a time BEFORE such things as floppy disks or computers!

 

[HovaGirl]

Chatting to the tea ladies, who twice a day brought round a trolley with proper tea, made in a pot, and served it in cups and saucers... with standard or 'management' biscuits !

I worked in two different offices. Both places had tea ladies. Both tea ladies were called Gladys.

 

[HovaGirl]

Punch girls ... who used to do all data entry, copying it from hand written entries on green lined sheets of paper. Twice, to make sure the data was accurately transcribed.

And they used to be forced to take regular breaks, during which they sat around in a circle ... knitting.

One was a punch operator and the other was a punch verifier. In our office, they didn't discuss knitting. They discussed boys.

 

[HovaGirl]

I used to get Luncheon Vouchers when I first started working properly in '92.

Were they still around in 1992? I got them when I first went to work for Amex in 1970!

 

[HovaGirl]

The process you refer to is called validation, The punch cards would be typed twice to ensure that the correct character had been typed. If the combination was wrong the card would be rejected when it went through the card reader. The wrong hole would be covered by s small plastic label. The problem was that if the label was nit fully on the card would get jammed in the reader and in fact would cause a 'wreck' where several cards for get torn up. Anybody who's had to dig bits of ripped card out of a reader will know what I mean.

Talking of floppies, the media that replaced the punch card, the 8" floppy disk, not many will remember them. When PCs arrived the floppies 5 and and quarter and then three and a half inched. Of course there was also the Zip disk but not many will remember them.

Oh, the company computer would be locked in a room were only authorised personnel would be allowed and it had air conditioning, smoke and fire detection and CO2 or Halon gas extingishers. There would be oxygen masks and tanks around the walls. The computer itself might have taken up the space of a basketball court but in fact an Iphone would be far more powerful.

I worked at Amex and the Computer Room was kept at a special temperature and only certain personnel were allowed in there. The computer was HUGE and took up the same space as a 5-a-side football pitch.

There were punch cards and punch tape, similar to telex tape with holes in it. The tape was less sophisticated than the cards which replaced them. The cards were rectangular and data holes were punched in them. The verifier would re-punch the data, and the card would lock if the newly-punched data didn't match. Amex replaced punch card machines with machines which put the info onto magnetic tape. These tapes were then taken to the aforementioned computer room. This was a good decade or more before floppy disks.

 

[RexCathedra]

When I first went into teaching, I had to show the principal's secretary anything I wanted to photocopy. If it was mostly white space, like a test or a quiz, I was curtly told to go back and cut a spirit-duplicating master (purple 'ditto', I think you know it as the Banda machine?) and reproduce it that way. You could spot teachers at the supermarket by their purple-tinted thumbs.