I was recently decluttering and came across a mountain of old reports and documents from an era before scanners were available or the ‘cloud’ had been invented. It brought home to me how document generation and storage (not to mention gender balance) has changed since I entered the labour force in the early 1970s.
As a graduate student I acquired rudimentary typing skills writing up various theses. On my joining the Central Bank in the mid-1970s, I arrived with my typewriter under my arm and placed it on my desk. A few hours later I was summoned to a higher being and told that there were lower beings called ‘typists’ (all women, of course) who did the low-caste job of typing up manuscripts written by higher beings (almost all men, of course), and that my typewriter was a potential destabilising force within the organisation.

Screen time
During the 1980s, typewriters came under threat from the personal computer. Computers had been widely used since the 1960s in government and businesses, but they were expensive, monstrously large and communicated with humans through punched card input and paper output. The president of IBM, Thomas Watson in the late 1940s thought that there might be a world market ‘for maybe five computers’ and ‘5,000 copying machines’. Probably the worst forecast ever made!
Apple and IBM came up with the idea of a ‘personal’ computer that was about the size of an old-style valve radio and communicated with........

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