In the mid-term, the replacement of typewriters with computers led to the secretary's job description going away (phone answering machines helped too). Somewhe

In the mid-term, the replacement of typewriters with computers led to the secretary's job description going away (phone answering machines helped too). Somewhere I read (warning: this may be apocryphal) that secretaries were exactly one of the reasons Xerox never cashed in on the personal computer (or the Xerox Star): Xerox managers had secretaries to do their typing, and couldn't imagine doing it themselves; nor could they imagine giving their secretary a piece of hardware that cost as much as the secretary's yearly salary. (The Xerox Star cost somewhere in the range of $15k, I'm just guessing what a secretary's salary was back then. And never mind that factory laborers used machinery that cost at least that much.)