Modern · 1980
Personal Computing Spreads
The personal computer crossed from hobby to office equipment at the end of the 1970s and the start of the 1980s. The Apple II was already in small businesses. VisiCalc, the spreadsheet released in 1979, gave those machines a reason to exist that accountants understood. IBM's PC, introduced in 1981, made the category respectable in large companies, and the IBM-compatible clones made it cheap enough to spread. By the middle of the decade a computer on a desk was no longer a stunt.
The casualty was the typing pool, and more broadly the idea that producing a document was someone else's job. The person who had dictated began to type, badly at first, and then to expect everyone else to do the same.
Software as the new tool trade
Spreadsheets, word processors, and database programs created work that had no name yet. Someone had to set up the templates, rescue the files, choose the machine, and explain to a vice president why the printer was silent. That someone became the IT support role, the departmental power user, and the small-business consultant who installed a system and then lived on the phone. WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 were skills you could put on a résumé, and for a few years they were scarce enough to raise a wage.
Programming left the locked room. A useful program could be written by a person who had never seen a mainframe. That opened software to a much wider group, and it also flooded the occupation. The mystique of 1950 thinned. Being the only one who could make the machine go was no longer a secure identity, because the machine was on thirty desks.
The pool drains
Word processing was first a centralized upgrade of the typing pool: a room of dedicated machines and operators. Then the software moved onto the general-purpose PC, and managers discovered they could hand the drafting back to professionals and secretaries with a computer each. Central pools shrank through the late 1980s and 1990s. Secretaries who could run the software became executive assistants with a wider brief. Secretaries whose value had been speed at a keyboard found the speed less scarce.
Typesetting shops felt a related blow. What had required a compositor and a print house could be approximated, then equaled, by desktop publishing. PageMaker arrived in 1985. Small printers and design studios absorbed work that union compositors had held. The printer did not die. The specialized step of setting type as a separate trade lost its middle.
A job inside every job
The lasting change was not a single new title. It was the expectation that accountants, lawyers, journalists, and engineers maintain their own documents, their own numbers, and eventually their own files. Computer literacy became a hiring filter across occupations that had never been technical. People who could not or would not cross that filter were sorted downward, often without anyone calling it a skill change.
Support staff did not disappear in 1980. The ratio changed, and the status of pure transcription fell. Every later story about a tool that lets one person do what a department did, including the AI chapter, is a repeat of this one at a different desk.
Work that grew
- PC support specialist
- Spreadsheet analyst
- Desktop publisher
- Software trainer
- Departmental systems administrator
Work that lost its place
- Centralized typing pool
- Dedicated word-processing operator
- Hot-metal and much phototypesetting composition