The Jobs Of Yesteryear: Obsolete Occupations

After 1900, when so-called artificial ice became generally accepted as safe, mass quantities were produced at ice plants and delivered to homes.

That's so bizarre. I would have thought people in the past preferred man-made ice as soon as it was invented. Who would want ice from a frozen lake? Lakes are full of all kinds of gross stuff.

I guess I'll have to remember that fact when people argue about the superiority of naturally-derived products.

The idea of a typist pool intrigues me. It reminds me of the concept of a thread pool or connection pool, the idea being that one has many instances of a certain resource to share distribute over requests. Rudimentary parallelism and task scheduling seem to have existed since the dawn of history, when humans congregated in sufficient numbers to organize labor en masse.

soon to be added...

data entry specialist - at the dawn of modern computing in the late 20th century, data integration was so difficult that companies often employed entire teams of people to type in hardcopy of output from other computer systems.