Technology Then... and Now

As we live in what has been called the Information Age, it is only logical that the greatest improvements during the last sixty-odd years have been in the office.  In fact, the changes in office technology were so great that this can not be called an evolution, but a revolution.

My uncle worked, and still works, in the corporate and tax division of Clifford Chance, a great monster of a British law firm with offices around the globe.  The environment in such a firm is almost stereotypically corporate; the job is fine, the money is great, but the atmosphere just drains your life away with all its fluorescent lighting and rat-racing.  He began work in the 1970s; 1974, I believe.

In 1974, or thereabouts, there were no mobile phones, much less smartphones, flat-screen televisions, or internet.  Even though there was no internet, there were computers; great, big, hulking machines in glass enclosures with raised flooring that were used in factories for inventory control and in offices like this one for number crunching, which was done by a specially-trained computer operator at night, as the lawyers leaving work gave her jobs to do.  Word processing and computers did not mix; in fact, the slang for the one computer the London head office owned was "expensive calculator".  For word processing, there was the electric typewriter; not the electronic, but the classic IBM Selectric that had a whirring engine and plugged into the wall.

At great expense, the management of Clifford Chance saw fit to purchase what would now be called  fax machines for the offices in London, Paris, Prague, and elsewhere; they were then called telecopiers (this is still the case in French), or telefax boxes.  Regardless, the slang was then, and is now, "Mojo Wire", although what faxing has to do with morphine (mojo) I can't fathom.  Back then, the Mojo Wire was a olive drab-coloured box with a spinning drum around which a flimsy sort of paper called thermofax would be placed.  A vintage Mojo Wire would print at the blazing fast speed of seven minutes per page and would fill the office with the smell of burning plastic.

The xerox was, mercifully, common by this time; as it was very much in demand, the xerox at Clifford Chase was a very large autocollating model that required a trained operator.  I'm unsure how the boys at that company could possibly have managed without a xerox machine.  It was quite easy to mimeo a document if one prepared a stencil for it when he was making it; otherwise, he was out of luck.  In a law practice with a mimeo, you'd be more often out of luck than in it.

Ten years later, the landscape had changed.  Mobile phones had been invented; about as large and heavy as a brick, they required a briefcase-sized wet battery to be held in the other hand.  These telephones were very expensive at the time (costing as much as a small car), but they were evidently worth the price for the lawyers, young and old.

The real player, however, in the 1980s, was not the mobile phone; too early for that.  The real player was the computer.  In 1981, IBM, the maker of the large computer in Clifford Chance's basement, came out with the Personal Computer; soon, each paralegal and secretary had his or her own Personal Computer, and the huge mainframe was taken to the rubbish dump, despite being technically superior in every possible way (but less convenient).

Even the venerable Mojo Wire (fax) changed, although the name for it didn't.  Gone was the awkward drum and the acrid smell; now, the Mojo Wire transmitted at the speed of one page per three and a half minutes, odourlessly and on standard paper that fed itself into a slot.

In 1995, the internet arrived; it was a primitive thing compared to the internet of today, and logging on to the internet would tie up the phone and the Mojo Wire, if they didn't have separate lines.

The smartphone also arose from two independent concepts during the era: the miniaturised mobile phone and the personal digital assistant.  In fact, the personal digital assistant of ten years ago did not look all that much different from today's iPhone, with the exception of the monochrome touch screen and the lack of a telephone feature.

Here we are in 2011, wondering how the hell our forefathers managed to even think about doing business, what with the lack of office devices and all.  I am myself amazed at how we went from a machine that copies paper (the xerox) to a machine that sends copies by phone (the Mojo Wire) to personal mobile phones and computer technology.