nightfrost/istockphoto
The modern office is always changing. Truly, always. Just think about where we were five years ago, when we were all actually in an office.
Tech advances at a rapid rate, and no matter how good an invention may be at the time, it’s not immune to ending up as nothing more than a paperweight. Check out these office supplies and tools that no longer have much need in this world.
Typewriters are probably the most obvious pick here; unless you are an eccentric novelist from a movie, you don’t need these anymore. Every computer and phone does this a whole lot more efficiently; you don’t even need to type anymore, with talk-to-text advancements.
The unavoidable truth is that our phones do almost all of this now. The digital age has replaced all, and digital address books have replaced even the most rigorously-updated of rolodexes.
We’ve always been looking for ways to make copies. Mimeograph machines used stencils to do that, but photocopiers in the ‘70s and ‘80s put these things in the ground.
Remember pencils? Well, we had to sharpen them, and we needed to do it by means of a huge mechanical crank. Then, when we zipped that invention into the 21st century, we turned pencil sharpeners into a little scary device that plugged into the wall and gobbled up pencils like a wood chipper.
Now those things are out, too. Pencils in general, are out.
Dot matrix printers, which used a print head made up of small pins, still exist in some places. They’ve largely been replaced by inkjet and laser printers.
With the rise of accounting software, the need to keep real books isn’t as much alive. This is a matter of personal preference of course, with many accountants preferring to use their own handwriting rather than software, but there’s no need to deal with your company’s finances by hand anymore.
Microfilm, which is exactly what it sounds like, was immensely popular in the ‘30s and ‘40s for its ability to hold a lot of storage in a small item, and lasted until the ‘90s. You won’t find any microfilm viewers in your company’s storage closet today.
Do some surgeons still have pagers and beepers? Probably. I am unable at this time to talk to every surgeon in the world and find out their preferences. That said, nobody needs one. Phones, as always, have cut out the need.
Early voice recorders were called dictaphones, and it allowed somebody to record something that was meant to be typed up later. We can now speak directly into our phones and have it type what we’re saying, and even as far as regular voice recordings go, there’s an app for that, too.
Boy, were people obsessed with duplicating things, or what? They must have flipped when they heard about Control + C. Carbon paper was thin, and coated with a waxy substance that would transfer whatever was pressed on it onto another sheet. A long, hard way to make a copy.
Flash drives, which are essentially obsolete now that we can share large files near-instantaneously, are just smaller versions of floppy discs. Floppys died in the mid-’90s, but still lives on as the “Save” icon in many different software platforms.
Teletypes were kind of like typewriters that sent messages to each other. You probably don’t need to see much more than the words “tele” and “type” to understand that the modern version of this is the text message.
It’s not so much that there’s a better tool for punching holes than a hole puncher. That’s not what I’m getting at. What I’m getting at is: What job still exists that requires you to punch your own holes in paper? The need to organize hard copies of files into binders has plummeted significantly in the digital age.
Some jobs require old-fashioned time clock punch-ins, mostly because it’s less expensive than updating to a digital system. But these days, time management is a whole lot easier online.
I sure wish that email hadn’t come along as the most efficient way to send somebody a message, because I would love to live in a world where everybody was blasting messages through an office in those wacky tubes. Really feels like something out of “The Jetsons.”
There are still probably plenty of people who still use fax machines, so to call them completely obsolete is unfair. I myself used them when I worked in TV, 10 years ago. However, nobody needs these guys anymore, and anybody holding onto them probably doesn’t need to be.
For more fun nostalgia and trivia, sign up for our free newsletters.
