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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of that, I need to find time one of these days to research what the hell "a memo" is. I understand it was a piece of paper of sorts, used in a way similar to how e-mails are used today, but I don't understand how they were delivered to people, what was the equivalent of MTA there. I know how to use the word in writing ("I didn't get the memo"), but not much more than that.

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My understanding is these were printed letters circulated internally via the mailroom. Most companies had workers who circulated both internal and external mail - so a couple times a day someone would come by with letters for you, both from the outside world, and from inside the office. Memoranda were generally announcements distributed to many people in the office.

There were normally two trays or boxes for paper on people's desk, one was the "inbox" and one was the "outbox," and the mail person would place the new stuff in the inbox and take anything from the outbox to circulate it around the office.

I never really lived that, although my first desk job did have an inbox and an outbox, the team wasn't big enough to have a mailroom, so we would just use those boxes to drop papers at other people's desks - hence the outbox didn't really get used, but the inbox did. Usually once a day a bundle of mail would get dropped off at the front desk and someone would take a turn walking the letters around the office, but there weren't that many of them as email was already a thing at that point.

Pretty much - I started work before even internal email was a thing, so everything was done on paper. And often hand-written paper at that. Hell, I made the first Word template for a work-item ticket! Before that we had custom forms to fill out.

Even better, the developers worked in a different building to our users, so there would often be a couple of days lag to getting a response. If you needed a quicker answer, you had to phone them, or schedule a meeting if you needed to explain something in more detail.

A person so inclined can still order interoffice routing envelopes ("hundred milers") from most stationers. For the yoots, those were string-tied manilla envelopes with twenty to one hundred little addressing boxes that be re-used until there was no more room to cross out the previous addressee and add a new one.

Found one of those in the stacks of papers from my father's time at IBM. Funny how paper-based information technology was back then - the first thing that comes to mind are the punch cards, but also later program listings were printed out a lot.

We used stacks of "endless paper" core dumps / assembler listings when painting rooms, as you could just unfold a huge stack of paper to protect the floor from paint splatters.

The model I used (less than 10 years ago) had a grid of punched holes so you could quickly tell if there was anything in it.

As recently as 2008, I actually used those interoffice routing envelopes to submit the receipts for my expense reports. Then they introduced a new process involving scan and email.

this is still more or less how the US Air Force operates

The internal "mail room" used to be a much bigger deal. At large companies, some number of times a day an actual person would come around with a cart, put things in your in-tray and remove things from your out-tray. Once their round had been completed they would return to the mail room to sort the outgoing materials and then repeat the process.

I suspect that one of the reasons "starting in the mail room" used to be so venerated is that it's a good way to get to know a wide swath of people inside a company in a relatively short period.

Better Call Saul shows a lot of said mail room culture; not sure if it's accurate, but it's almost like a documentary in corporate life in the early 2000's. Wouldn't have thought paper was still as much of a thing back when, but, it's a law office and the internet hadn't been that much of a thing yet.

Memo is abbreviated, firstly. The word is memorandum, and as the Latin root suggests, is something to “bring to mind.” Typically written or typed notes, which might get copied and passed around. They have more jargon meanings in certain contexts.

To add to others' comments about mail-rooms and internal posts, a memo would commonly also have a header section with a list of intended recipients and CC (literally, Carbon Copy), plus depending on organisation, an information security classification meaning sometimes they would be distributed via envelope, or require signing receipt for. Envelopes could be sealed in any number of ways, the most common I've seen is masking tape with a signature across it.

Needless to say, the mail-room were privy to a lot of information should they care for it.

Edit: Working where both emails and physical memos were used: Drafting a physical memo elicited a very different state of mind from banging out an email. Printing it out, proof reading on paper, there was a lot more care via reflection knowing this would be in someone's hand and they'd likely be looking at it on their desk, giving full attention, making notes with pen over it, rather than simply a message displayed on a screen while multiple other tasks pop up from other incoming mails or calendar reminders or IM chats. Slower, but a level of preciseness and everything needing to be just right, all the way down to how many spaces after a period vs a colon.

Having worked somewhere that still used physical memos, I can share my experience. They were simply "important" notices and announcements printed on single sheets of paper hand-delivered to our desks by one of the managers or their secretaries. They'd often be on our desks before we got in, containing information that was realized the day before, but anything particularly urgent would be hand-delivered during the work day, usually around lunch.

They were completely interchangeable with emails, including in the way they were written (like short letters). I don't understand why we used them, but alas, we did.

I worked somewhere that used paper memos and initially I thought they were just woefully tech-inept. It turns out if you’re doing shady stuff a written memo that can be immediately shredded is one of the more “secure” methods of communication because it doesn’t create a digital record like an email or a phone call do.

I don’t know if this is still true, but it was sometimes the case that toner would retain images of what had been printed on it and could be recovered by forensic specialists.

CIA learned from the fall of the Shah of Iran that strip shredding is, given time and patience, a reversible operation.

We were doing crosscut shredding - to the point of practically atomizing the paper - then incinerating the shredded material in the military before the Shah fell, at least for Secret and above. If the CIA wasn't doing that, well, that's their own lookout.

To be fair, they were in a bit of a hurry.

Many large buildings in the past had mail chutes[1]. I’ve worked in a building with one; it also had a pigeon-hole messagebox per floor so people could get their mail.

It wasn’t used that much, though, except for the odd journal subscription that someone had delivered to their office address. The system would only work with envelopes and magazines, anything bigger had to be collected from a central mailroom.

Sending mail between offices was a little more convoluted —you could just use the post or a courier yourself, but if you got your document or memo in the hands of the right person (typically a mailroom clerk) before a cut-off time, it’d be sent as part of the company’s larger delivery.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_chute

PS. Google Image Search has a good selection of office memos.

I’m a millennial (late thirties), but I’ve worked in offices where there’s an internal mail system in which you write someone’s name on an envelope and then when it gets delivered, the name is scratched off to make it available for reuse for the next internal mailing.

Similar age and experience. Office keys, property tags, t-shirts or other swag, etc. arrive in those campus mail envelopes with the little string-and-knob closure and about 50 places for addressees on them.

I work at a top-5 tech corporation, and we still have that! Though the mail room is the closest destination, with three different outboxes, and personalized in-box slots. It's handy for sending physical items (such as ship-it badges, booklets bringing awareness to this or that, or the occasional physical bill to be expensed).

If I have a package delivered, there's someone with corporate security clearances that will swing it by the desk.

I had an internship at a county hall once (IT department), I had to use those as well to have the back-up tapes I had to switch delivered to our other building every day.

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