Office Life in the 1980's (Vintage Photos) (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Office Life in the 1980's (Vintage Photos) (2019)

weare.guru

70 pointsaccrual54 comments

Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20230330195500/https://weare.gur...

Thank you. I entered offices in the 90s, and still was curious about what could be so different a decade ago, besides the impressive machines and magazines. Forgot there were numerous binders, they kept multiplying. If you inherited a cubicle with dusty old binders on it, you couldn't get rid of them easily.

Be sure to check out the drafting tables link at the bottom of the page (or this one, if it times out):

https://web.archive.org/web/20230408160205/https://weare.gur...

What's interesting is that this huge change in design technology has produced no similarly huge change in the physical product being designed. Buildings are designed and built at about the same speed as they were then. They cost as much or more in inflation-adjusted terms.

Yes, I know that there are lots of specific things that are easier now that we have CAD and related software, but a 1950s architecture student who was told about these technologies would probably predict major resulting changes in the speed of design and construction. But this has not occurred.

What has happened is parametric designs. That is the big game changer, the number of people working on this stuff has dropped, and the flexibility of the designs has gone up. But on the overall price of a building it never made much difference because the drafting never was a huge factor in cost.

I worked for a big dutch architect (as a freelancer) right around the time that this transition was happening, they made spaceframes, structure made of knots and pipes with threaded holes in their ends, the obvious advantage was that if you knew the dimensions of the building you could just generate a BOM and start cutting, which before then was a lot of very time consuming computation. Never before did I get confronted so visibly with the effects that my work had on others, and it was a lesson that I never forgot. Essentially I was instrumental in making a whole bunch of draftsmen redundant and they were helping me to bring that about.

The company still exists, they still make spaceframes and I highly doubt you'll even find a drafting pencil or a RotRing pen anywhere on the premises. I still have Makowski's books on my shelf 35 years later.

> Buildings are designed and built at about the same speed as they were then. They cost as much or more in inflation-adjusted terms.

If that is true, I bet the % amount of labour has been reduced of the total cost, and materials and/or shifting standards have swallowed up the difference.

In the first picture, why are they all wearing lab coats?

Drafting floor attire. When I was in EE we had to wear the same when in drafting class. This was in 1982.

Was there a technical reason (minimize potential smearing? tearing of the paper?)? Or was it more symbolic attire? Would management wear it?

There is this thing called analine ink, this is mostly a historical thing nowadays but in the early days of professional drafting in the industrial age it was used quite a bit and besides being nasty (poisonous) it is also pretty much indelible, what's stained stays stained, no matter how much you try to wash it out.

https://psap.library.illinois.edu/advanced-help/paper-unboun...

So I suspect the overclothing had not so much a cool lab coat vibe as well as a protect-my-valuable-cloting-underneath role. Even later drafting inks (such as in the RotRing pens that we used to use) is pretty good at staining stuff. I used to absolutely suck at drafting (my friend Jeroen at the time was an absolute master at it), I just didn't have the patience for it. And more than once I managed to foul up my 'smock' by moving too fast on a piece of work that wasn't dry yet. I still have some of my vellum from back then as well as a very early attempt at plotting using the computer for a sail maker using a hand-built plotter. That was much harder than it may seem to be today on account of it being hard to find something that could drive the pen without any slippage (this was just when Kevlar backed toothed belts became available commercially but they were still hideously expensive). But the idea that I could produce half decent drawings using the computer was an amazing skill to have.

Mostly so you don't ruin your clothes with indelible substances

I was a kid of the eighties (born in the seventies) and my best friend's father was a businessman and he'd constantly be working. So his office was also in his car where he already had.. a cellular phone! (I'm not even sure the contraption "cellphone" already existed).

So on the weekend when I'd go to the country side with my friend, we'd basically see this (he was always on the phone with either employees or clients so we had to keep quiet in the car) and it felt like being in the future:

https://www.sfchronicle.com/oursf/article/SF-s-first-cellula...

He even had the same haircut.

If I recall back then we would just call them car phones.

They even had a theme song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PF-iAV9YOqY

All that paper! I moved out of my house a few years ago and was amazed at how much paper handling infrastructure I had accumulated over the decades (I got rid of it all). File cabinets and file folders, ring binders, hole punches, pens, envelopes, binders, clips, sturdy pouches for travel documents, receipts, etc; transparencies and pens and brochures, and I was notorious for being a low-paper guy! Just chucked it all out.

Plus scientific papers, preprints, working papers and prepublished books for review. Kept the lab notebooks (the ones I wasn’t required to turn over to my employers).

And you had to carry a bunch of it (why I was so anti-paper) which was heavy — you were basically carrying tree branches with you wherever you went.

Yes, we always talked about the future paperless office and wondered when it would finally arrive. I was thinking about that recently when I noticed that hardly anyone prints anything in our office any more. I’m sure it happens once in a while as we do have printers but it’s pretty rare.

I suppose the large, high resolution screens and dynamically collaboratory documents mean that we don’t need to share physical documents anymore.

Box of floppies on many disks. They were so common. I had many of them. Floppies were a very stubborn technology. They wouldn't die as much as I wished them to. And for the longest time, they were the only way to flash BIOS on many systems.

Floppies, CDs, DVDs, PCMCIA cards, modems, CGA cards, MFM controllers, mechanical mice, ISA bus, parallel port, internal combustion engine... Things I used a lot. But do not miss at all. Good riddance.

God floppies were the worst. When you're on disk 18 of 20 and you get a bad sector... good times.

Oh, and the once or twice a month you had to clean your mice balls because to much crust was building up inside them.

As many complaints as I have about wireless and bluetooth they are still far more reliable than most of that 80s-start of 2000 stuff unless it was eye wateringly expensive equipment.

Gah I remember that. When I was first playing around with Linux at home I didn't have an Internet connection and the only way I could get it was relaying floppies back and forward from the university campus. This was about a mile walk from home. Of course I learned to verify the floppies very quickly after the first round trip back to the campus with a duff one. Also there was a pub half way which was a serious latency issue.

I'd used floppies for years before and they were probably all half duff but I'd never noticed.

> Also there was a pub half way which was a serious latency issue.

Well, at least the packets got forwarded eventually.

On at least one occasion they got left in the pub!

That makes it even funnier!

I once bought an ex undercover police vehicle that came with a folder that somehow had been forgotten under the passenger seat. Contents: a bunch of (paper) files, an identikit and a manual on how to take fingerprints.

I think you had the better excuse.

Oh that's terrible but definitely something I'd expect from the police!

You'd think they have a sanitization process for ex police property but apparently it isn't all that good or maybe just a genuine mistake.

Sneaker net

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

The internet usage that keeps you in shape

> Oh, and the once or twice a month you had to clean your mice balls because to much crust was building up inside them.

To me it always felt like a mouse with a clean ball was more responsive and accurate than a laser mouse. Especially in competitive gaming in the early 2000s. Not sure if that was just imagined on my part though. Part of me still thinks it's better. There's just something about the mechanical nature of the ball mouse. It felt like a precision instrument that had be cared for. A laser mouse in comparison has always been a bit gimmicky. Even though technically a modern laser mouse surely has way higher sample rates.

For me it wasn’t usually the balls, but the rollers that got all gunky. I kept a dental pick around to quickly clean them.

Your list there is very interesting to me.. sometime I daydream about what else in our society will be on the list in the next 20 years.

My first programming job, 1984, I had a two-floppy PC clone. The source code was in drive B. I put the editor floppy in drive A, wrote code, then put the compiler floppy in drive A, compiled code, if no errors then I put the linker floppy in drive A to link into an executable.

When I started work in the 1980's everyone smoked cigarettes at work.

ALOT of cigarettes. You had an ashtray on your desk and they all filled up quick.

I spent all day sitting at my desk working on Sirius 1 and Apricot "microcomputers" and smoking fags.

Every meeting was full of people lighting up and blowing smoke everywhere.

Weird, when you think about it.

I had a boss who was a former chain smoker of the era. His alternative in the 00s was to chew nicotine gum constantly all day. Actually chewing it like normal gum nonstop rather than cracking the shell and tucking it in the cheek like you're supposed to. He was probably getting a much bigger hit than with any real tobacco products.

As someone that smoked for a long time (stopped about a decade ago), that sounds hellish. I remember groups of people standing in the back of airplanes and smoking.

Smoking in planes - how did that ever make sense.

The worst thing as a non-smoker was being in the row of seats immediately in front of the smoking section at the back of the plane. There was a curtain divider but it did little to contain the clouds of smoke coming from behind.

Seems kind of nice, especially knowing that computers were used to augment human work rather than something to slave humans to. This is clear, from these photos at least, since the computer is not the primary mode of interaction between people and either things (like paper) or other people.

I presume that in many cases the paper was everything. Remember the term "paper pusher"?

Too many computer screens, not enough typewriters.

Most of those photos probably date from the late 80s, after IBM made small computers 'normal'.

Up till about 83-85, most offices had lots of typewriters and no screens.

You're right about when things were being adopted, but rather than calling these photos late 80s, it's maybe more to do with the photos being a bit more biased towards the offices of programmers or finance types rather than general business paper pushing offices.

I think most of these were taken from computer magazines.

It strikes me that their workspaces looked a mess from all the paper.

Then I look at my workspace, 10s of browser tabs, countless open windows, never enough desktop space.

But you can turn off your computer and all the mess stays inside it.

Also, search.

Also, the fact that you can even use a browser to find information.

In the 80s you had to send a letter to ask for information and wait days/weeks/months before it was delivered.

If you were in a hurry you could use fax. Which might be same-day if you were lucky. And didn't need a lasting copy. Or a particularly readable one.

> In the 80s you had to send a letter to ask for information and wait days/weeks/months before it was delivered.

I'm beginning to see that as a virtue. Now, if I don't respond to an email the same day people assume I've died or that I'm purposefully stiffing them. Instead of thinking about the answer. Some process delay that is inescapable isn't a bad thing per-se.

They seem to have gone all in with the aesthetic and used a server from the 80s too.

1980's. vintage. Well, I guess. Technically it counts as vintage, but it makes me feel like the cryptkeeper.

The BBC ran a photo feature from the year of a my birth a while back. They titled it "Relics of a bygone era."

That feels a lot harsher if you're in the frame.

/s Who is the cryptkeeper? OH a 1990's tele-vision puppet who would scare children!

Being old [and i'm hardly that] gets tiring sometimes. Too much to noodle upon.

Would love to visit that, but the cigarette smoke everywhere would probably ruin it

I guess that’s how my grandfather got lung cancer. Everybody were smoking in the office. He was the single one who never touched a cigarette.

No one is smoking?

In the 80s there would possibly be a smoking lounge in the bigger offices. Heck, my high school had one for teachers until probably 1986 or so.

By the mid 90’s they were all gone, smoking moved outside.

serial dec vtxxx and adm terminals - i remember it all so well. and actually, i quite liked it!

Also saw a DG and 3270 in there.

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