Evolution is a natural part of life — and likewise, so is extinction. In the natural habitat of the average employee, the office, this process is no different. Technology is constantly evolving, which means that old, outdated technology is constantly placed on the endangered office technologies list. Soon, they become altogether extinct.
The elders in my office tell me of times when a typical employee’s desktop consisted of little more than a telephone with rotating numbers, stacks of manila folders with files lined with perforated edges, notebooks, pencils, pens, and perhaps a machine used exclusively for addition and subtraction, if the job called for it.
In these prehistoric times of outdated office technologies, I am told, employees would gather in conference rooms and write on white boards – they called this collaboration and believed it efficient. At the end of the meeting they would lay signs out — DO NOT ERASE —in order to save their work.
When finished, they would rub cloth against the surface and their words would disappear. A crude step above cave drawings, these scribbles and doodles would decide the motives for the next fiscal year across the entire company. They say executives would fly across the country just to speak with one another. Phones were too impersonal and videoconferencing platforms were a distant dream of the future, like flying cars, clones and colonies on other planets.
What rudimentary, already outdated office technologies they could afford would provide only minor convenience — pagers that beeped to tell you that someone wanted you to call them, VHS tapes that needed to be rewound for several minutes before you could watch them, overhead projectors that required see-through paper in order to show anything against the wall. Truly these were dark and unenlightened times.
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I imagine brawls breaking out as employees scrambled to use the lone fax machine. Now we can send documents through email, Dropbox, what have you. I consider the painful arthritis from writing and drawing on easels and whiteboards, now replaced by keyboards and interactive displays.
I shudder to think of the thousands of trips to the mail room in order to send information to distant clients. Forests of trees fallen in order to send the same messages I instantly delete when they show up in the inbox of my Gmail account. These are all the very real costs that those outdated office technologies imposed!
Luckily for us, office technology has advanced and now civilized in the workplace. We can look on this list of outdated office technology and what has replaced it with the knowledge that these often torturous devices are nothing but a remnant of a lost world. They can’t hurt us anymore.
Click on “View Slideshow” to view our list of outdated office technologies.
Editor’s Note: This article first debuted on our sister publication, My TechDecisions. We updated it on December 8, 2023, with additional information to suit the Commercial Integrator audience.
