Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

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During this time, 'secretarial services' were still a thing, and women (and it was predominantly women) did WPM tests (words per minute) to qualify for a role in the office. I remember the noise of the IBM Selectrics in serried ranks in banks, and in offices. Amazing to think we worked just fine on a turn-around time of an hour to get a document done.

Also, this was a window when the printers unions in the Uk were going on strike as the first journalist-direct-entry systems were coming into the news print business. Rupert Murdoch went full bore with a new clean build, shut down the old printing, and locked them out. Huge strikes, police on horseback, riots.

ICL was trying to sell the home office/desktop office concept, it was still very much about the styling of a giant desk/cab with a tiny monitor and built in printer, and the key issue was the quality of the keyboard (as ever)

It turns out that seeing more than one line of input in a buffer helps. Who knew?

It used to be a legit career choice in Australia in the 1980s - back when I was at high school they taught typing as a vocation. I took typing because I thought it would help with my interest in computers although I did work for a time at University as a typist and had to take a typing speed test on a selectric.

You could leave high school, do a typing test and enter the public service to join rooms full of people typing up ugly, handwritten garbage from the other public servants. The main impediment to doing that work wasn't the equipment, it was the quality of other peoples handwriting (or shorthand).

By the time the 1980s rolled around, you could get typewriters with an entire line of memory and even with erase capabilities but those were conveniences for less experienced typists. If you were typing as a vocation, you learned not to screw up enough that you didn't really need an entire page of text to get it right.

There's a plot twist in Dorothy Sayer's "strong poison" (1930) which depends on the burden of completely re-doing a page because of a typo early on. It was a valid mcguffin right up until the mid eighties.. And then suddenly fell off a cliff of "how quaint: you just fix it in an editor and re-print"

Upvote for any mention of Dorothy Sayers. Amazing author and theologian.

My middle school in 1998[1] still taught typing. The typing classroom was equipped with a couple dozen Selectrics. Their combined use summed to cacophonous chorus. There were a few Apple iMac G3s placed along the periphery that the best students could use. It was, in retrospect, a profoundly transitional era in typing.

1. CA, central valley

You point more generally to the gradual total disappearance of skilled jobs that almost anyone can do with sufficient (substantial) training. These are jobs that are both amenable to automation and most profitable to automate.

In a few decades, we will be left with skilled jobs that only people with certain innate abilities can perform (after substantial training), and menial jobs that anyone can do with very little training.

Don’t forget skilled jobs in the “real” world. Plumbers, electricians, and the like will not die out.

I agree it would be very difficult to get robots to do either plumbing or electrics in a home environment as it is. However another option is that the job becomes simplified and dumbed down so home owners can do it themselves or with low skilled labour.

For example I would never consider replacing a gas boiler myself as it stands, but what if it was just a slot in unit of standardised size with simple idiot proof connectors no one could get wrong? What if it's an electrical heat pump with no explosive gases or carbon monoxide safety to worry about? Even if the home owner doesn't want to replace it, it might get simple enough that a lightly trained delivery truck driver could do it. For example the delivery guy installed my washing machine, not a plumber.

The problem with this isn't the new, it's the old. I live in a house that's almost 150 years old and _nothing_ is standard. I tried to hang a mirror on a wall yesterday, and turns out the wall isn't plumb - what should have been a 30 minute job turned into half a day of fixing up and making good 4 holes in the wall and shaving back the plaster to mount the bracket flush.

>However another option is that the job becomes simplified and dumbed down so home owners can do it themselves or with low skilled labour.

I come from a DIY family, I don't think skill is the primary barrier. The "why would you do that when you can just pay someone to do it?" attitude is pervasive. That's not a dismissive characterization either, that's paraphrasing as best I can what a friend said when another friend and I were on the couch watching a youtube maker video. And it's an attitude I've heard again and again over the years.

Sadly (IMHO) the world is generally going in the opposite direction. At least in Northern Europe there is more and more standardization of "this should be done exactly in Y dimension using material Z with connector X", and if you can't document compliance with that standard, your house is worth slightly less when you try to sell it.

Riffing on your example: even just the though of making all appliances cheap enough to be replaced when they break down, instead of repairing them, was and is a big step in this direction.

Agreed! Only people with a fairly high level of innate intelligence can become master tradespeople. Note that I’m not referring to low level positions, e.g. plumbing techs who only snake drains for their whole life or electrical techs who only change outlets.

I think it can be hard to predict these things. At least it’s not hard for me to imagine someone coming up with a way to make plumbing standard and easily replaceable in most buildings. Sort of how brick walls became something to come off an assembly line a few decades ago. Today we’re back to more traditional bricklaying here in Denmark because the assembly line stuff wasn’t aesthetic enough to keep selling, but the way we construct buildings has for the most part become like building with legos, and a heap of important trade skills that requires skilled tradespeople died along the way. All it takes for things like electricity and plumbing to go that way is for a company to figure out how to mass produce systems that are as easy to plug in as the rest (which has sort of already happened with ikea houses) and take it to world wide adoption.

This is not to say that I disagree with you, but being adaptable is more important than being just skilled. A lot of those typists eventually became secretaries and then spread further out to different parts of organisations, and a lot of them are still there. It’s only the people who don’t adapt who get left behind, and I’d like to point out here that I’m not a fan of that term. As I am Scandinavian that is probably of little surprise to people, but I think society has a responsibility to keep people useful so long that we require them to work until they are 73+.

> skilled jobs that almost anyone can do with sufficient (substantial) training. These are jobs that are both amenable to automation

The correlation between "almost any human can do it with sufficient training" and "amenable to automation" is weak to non-existing.

One curious class of jobs might be hanger-ons: people who are just there to give attention to rich-enough folks.

This is like the difference between a bow, and a crossbow.

One takes years to be an expert, the other weeks or months.

Same with a typewriter, vs a wordprocessor + printer. Imagine, typing entire documents fast, with no typos, whiteout, or correction capability.

That's expertise, that's learned skill.

No wonder a word processor, even in the early days of dot matrix or daisy wheel printing, was preferred.

The daisywheel printer was a scarce resource at work, the first daisy wheel typewriter was pretty much coveted by the few cogniscenti who were already up to speed with changing the head on an IBM golfball.

We were expected to proofread the living bejesus out of our stuff from RUNOFF (the pre-troff but very similar word processor which was on a Dec-10 amongst other things) on lineprinter, before queueing up to print it out on daisywheel. The paper was very satisfying fanfold with increadibly fine edge strips with the sprocket feed, tearing it back into loose sheets before binding was great. Well.. right up until you spotted a typo and had to go back and adjust the markup.

As a kid, I was stuck with a dot matrix, as were all I knew.

Yet at school, the head office secretary had a daisy wheel, and we all coveted that crazy clean and perfect output.

Graphics output be damned, it was perfection.

So I can well imagine the resource constraint where you worked.

Same here. My first printer was made by Roland and it was a fantastic piece of hardware. Really beautiful. My second was an Okidata and it was an amazing printer.

I was thinking about them the other day and got nostalgic for the tractor feed fan fold paper and dot matrix printers. Then I checked Amazon and saw how expensive they are now and the nostalgia faded quickly.

My mum is in her late 70s and can type faster than anybody I've ever seen. No idea how to use a computer, though.

When I was out of a job for awhile looking for some ways to make a quick buck I thought I could find some kind of typing job with my 150 wpm ability. I couldn't find anything at all near me. If only it were the 1980s again this skill would be more marketable.

Mechanical turk roles exist which exploit this skill but the rate of return is often low. Typically it's transcribing receipts into data entry, or doing subtitling input from recordings, transcribing. It's being eroded by speech recognition and OCR software but still exists. If you gain some kind of in-role social credit I believe the pay improves.

Supplemental income for a home bound person, carer role, that kind of thing? I might help.

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