Technology in the office: From typewriters to smartphones

Offices have changed dramatically over the past decades. In this post, we take a brief, historical look at the last 60 years of office tech.

The way we work is constantly changing as are the tools used to carry out work. The explosion of technology in the past decades has not only provided us with new tools but it has also changed the way offices look, how businesses organize themselves and much more.

Let’s take a look at some of the office game changers of the past.

1960s

Here’s some perspective for you. In the 1960s the typewriter had been around for almost 90 years. Still, it was one of the most important pieces of tech in the 1960s office.

To be fair, computers DID exist in the 60s but as these whirring monsters would cost a fortune and occupy a large room or an entire floor they were not something you’d find in an average office. Kind of like the supercomputers of our age. They exist, but except for the true titans of industry, you won’t find them at your average company.

Before the smartphones got smart, they were just phones. Although the classic rotary dial phone was first invented in 1891, it took until 1962 before keypad dialling was introduced. In a 1960s office, phones were an important piece of the communication of a business, both internally and externally.

Another technology that still echo through the decades is the photo carousel. Think of it like an analogue PowerPoint presentation. You prepare the photos or slides and load them into the round, revolving deck and project to a white screen or wall.

More examples of modern technology that transformed the office in the 60s include Xerox machines.

1970s

Typewriters continued their dominance through the 70s, albeit with improvements. For example electrical typewriters designed to minimize noise in the office environment.

The  1970s also saw the introduction of pocket-sized electronic calculators. No longer was calculation limited a machine tied to a desk.

Whether Tipp-Ex or Post-It Notes qualify as technology is debatable, but the impact they had on life in the office is undeniable. Tipp-Ex allowed fixing of small errors instead of re-printing or re-typing the entire document.

Post-it notes were introduced in the early 70s. Love it or hate it, the popularity and ubiquitousness of sticky notes (which has quite an interesting origin story) are testaments to its cultural impact on the office.

During the decade, computers took the steps from basement-dwelling leviathans to the more bite-sized boxes we’re more familiar with. When Apple introduced their Apple II personal computer in 1978, the PC industry exploded with a bang whose echoes are still heard today.

1980s

By the 1980s, the office started to resemble what we today refer to as the modern office. Desktop computers like IBM PC, Commodore 64 and Macintosh 128K made an entry on a wide front in the office, and made a significant impact on how knowledge was processed in the organization. Still, compared to the computers we know and use today, the PCs of the 80s were somewhat primitive.

As an example, the Apple Macintosh 128K (introduced in 1984 by the now-famous Super Bowl tv-ad titled “1984”) boasted specs like a 6 MHz processor, 128 kilobytes of RAM and a black-and-white screen with a 512 by 342 pixels. All assembled and bundled neatly in a beige box weighing 7.5kg (16.5 lbs).

The 1980s also saw the first commercial cell phones brought to market. Motorola DynaTAC 8000X was introduced in 1983 at a $4,000 price tag. Equipped with a DynaTAC 8000X, its owner could talk wirelessly for a full 30-minutes.

Honorable mentions that rose to fame in the 80s: Fax machines and printers.

1990s

In the 90s, the desktop PCs became increasingly common, and increasingly powerful. The first commercial laptops started popping up in the office. Quite bulky compared to the laptops of today, and not nearly as powerful as their desktop contemporaries, the laptops still found a solid place in the 1990s office.

A significant leap that wasn’t as related to hardware was the introduction of more intuitive graphical user interfaces (GUIs). With Windows 3.11 was released in 1993 and sparked an era of user interface improvements that is still ongoing today. A more intuitive approach to computing effectively democratized the productivity gains that could be realized with the help of computers. With the barriers lowered, almost anyone could now work with computers.

While technically what we call the ‘internet’ got started decades earlier, the 1990s saw the introduction of the World Wide Web to the wider masses. This ushered in the internet age we still are living in.

The use of Internet took off dramatically during the latter half of the decade, spreading throughout both offices and homes.

2000s

Optimism for this new Internet-thing grew a little too much, and a little too fast leading up to the infamous Dot-com bubble. As the bubble burst in March 2000, the party was over and the world woke up to a harsh reality. Most things Internet had left a sour taste in many mouths but nevertheless, this setback was more or less temporary. The popularity and benefits of internet continued to materialize during the 00s.

With higher speeds and more affordable plans, internet usage continued to boom and allowed companies to work more effectively on a global scale. Internet services like Google, online payments and much more made it easier than ever to research, process and leverage more information than ever before.

Improvements in computing led to laptops packing more punch at a shrinking price. As the laptops got better, the value of having a mobile computer started to outpace the classical desktop PC.

2010s

It’s a little tricky to list the defining tech of this decade since it’s barely over. That being said, it’s safe to say that technology now permeates and in many ways define the  office. IT has evolved from a back-office service function to a strategic concern for most companies. The IT infrastructure can make or break a business in this global, competitive market.

Although “smartphones” can be said to have existed in one way or another since at least the 90s, it’s fair to say that they came of age in the late 00s, and continued to boom in the 2010s. In 2019, a smartphone or tablet can do pretty much anything a desktop computer could do just a few years ago.

Services like cloud computing and cloud storage has removed physical tech from the office – you don’t need a large buzzing server room to host a website anymore – and instead replaced it with software.

Internet speeds are now fast enough to run increasingly complex software in web browsers, which means more and more work is moving online. Cloud storage effortlessly sync files and documents between whatever devices you want to work on.

This is part of the larger trend where productivity tools over the last decade have turned into software versions of themselves, moved into the computers and finally on to internet.

…and the 2020s?

As we’re soon to leave the 2010s behind and move into the 2020s, I’ll allow myself a stab at what the office might look like in the coming decade.

 The office will look less like.. well, an office

As we continue to do more and more with less tech, the physical appearance of the office will be less tied to the hardware needed to carry out work.

Smartphones, laptops and 5G wireless connections means that work is more and more something you do, and less a place you go to.

How will they look? Like a café? Like a hotel? Like a home? I don’t know, but I’ll be very surprised if we go back to the cubicle farms of the past.

Here we can already see forward-leaning companies designing their office in a fashion that’s called activity based workplace. What it means is a workplace consisting of a multitude of different environments – quiet areas for work that require stillness and concentration, cafeteria like spaces for informal meetings and so on.

Connecting with the building itself

As we’ve seen in the office tech exposé above, there is a rough pattern our tools seem to favor; mechanical to electric to digital to online. First a tool is analog and mechanical (for example the typewriter) after which and electric version is conceived (electric typewriter). One could say the digital version of the typewriter is a laptop – to be honest, they don’t even look that different! The next logical step is online, connected, collaborative word processing like Google Docs.

Much of the tech we saw pop up over the decades until today have followed this natural path. However, there is one type of “technology” which has been more or less left out of this evolution: the building itself.

Sure, real estate has had its milestones since the 60s but compare it to the computer trajectory and it’ll look bleak. Buildings are more or less still somewhere between the analog and electric stage. They are still in the 20th century when we are over here, living in the 21st!

My prediction is that in the 2020s we’ll see a great deal more initiatives to haul the buildings into this century.

Once buildings are digitized and connected, we’ll be able to interact with them in new ways. Just like your laptop and smartphone can interact on the same network, the buildings will brought into this mix.

The most obvious interface with the building is the smartphone, as it’s already the go-to interface for most things, it’s small, and since you bring it wherever you go, interacting with smart offices will be based on your location. That is, the context and your location in the office will determine the ways you’ll interact with your environment.

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Post script

This blog post was written purely on an online word processor using a laptop, with the author comfortably reclined in a chair, typing these very sentences on a wireless keyboard. The research for this article was entirely conducted on the Internet using popular search engines and Wikipedia, the free and open encyclopaedia. No book was opened nor a phone call placed. Not a single fax was sent.