145 ms·
My understanding is these were printed letters circulated internally via the mailroom. Most companies had workers who circulated both internal and external mail
by burlesona 6y ago
My understanding is these were printed letters circulated internally via the mailroom. Most companies had workers who circulated both internal and external mail - so a couple times a day someone would come by with letters for you, both from the outside world, and from inside the office. Memoranda were generally announcements distributed to many people in the office.
There were normally two trays or boxes for paper on people's desk, one was the "inbox" and one was the "outbox," and the mail person would place the new stuff in the inbox and take anything from the outbox to circulate it around the office.
I never really lived that, although my first desk job did have an inbox and an outbox, the team wasn't big enough to have a mailroom, so we would just use those boxes to drop papers at other people's desks - hence the outbox didn't really get used, but the inbox did. Usually once a day a bundle of mail would get dropped off at the front desk and someone would take a turn walking the letters around the office, but there weren't that many of them as email was already a thing at that point.
- drbw 6y agoPretty much - I started work before even internal email was a thing, so everything was done on paper. And often hand-written paper at that. Hell, I made the first Word template for a work-item ticket! Before that we had custom forms to fill out. Even better, the developers worked in a different building to our users, so there would often be a couple of days lag to getting a response. If you needed a quicker answer, you had to phone them, or schedule a meeting if you needed to explain something in more detail.
- stan_rogers 6y agoA person so inclined can still order interoffice routing envelopes ("hundred milers") from most stationers. For the yoots, those were string-tied manilla envelopes with twenty to one hundred little addressing boxes that be re-used until there was no more room to cross out the previous addressee and add a new one.
- japanuspus 6y agoThe model I used (less than 10 years ago) had a grid of punched holes so you could quickly tell if there was anything in it.
- chokma 6y agoFound one of those in the stacks of papers from my father's time at IBM. Funny how paper-based information technology was back then - the first thing that comes to mind are the punch cards, but also later program listings were printed out a lot. We used stacks of "endless paper" core dumps / assembler listings when painting rooms, as you could just unfold a huge stack of paper to protect the floor from paint splatters.
- skissane 6y agoAs recently as 2008, I actually used those interoffice routing envelopes to submit the receipts for my expense reports. Then they introduced a new process involving scan and email.
- thatfunkymunki 6y agothis is still more or less how the US Air Force operates