> secretaries who took dictation (with a typewriter, of course) to write those documents

Complete aside, just because you brought up this thought and I like the concept of it:

My mom trained professionally as a secretary in the 1970s and worked in a law office in the 1980s; at that point, if you were taking dictation, you were generally doing longhand stenography to capture dictation, and then you'd type it up later. A stenotype would've been a rarity in a pre-computer office because of the cost of the machine; after all, if you need a secretary for all these other tasks, it's cheaper to give them a $2 notebook than it is a $1,500+ machine.