I recently found a pile of books in the back of a cupboard at work. They are a series of books introducing children to the wonderful world of computers written in the early 1970s and published by
Chambers. The books have inspiring names, such as "
The Useful Computer" (IBSN 0 550 77111 5) and "
The Computer Becomes Literate" (ISBN 0 550 77109 3). Throughout the books there are delightful photographs of computer devices being used in business (very few home computers in the early 70s).
Considering the age of the books, let's assume that they are fair use. Which is good because I want to post them here and write faintly amusing things about them.
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| In this image we can see a person from the 1970s using one of the most up-to-the-date computer systems to update her eHarmony profile. This would then printed out and placed on noticeboards around the building. |
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| In the 1970s it was thought that Babbage's Analytical Engines would become smaller, faster and more portable. It was thought that the main use for these flawfless mathematical calculation machines would be for sending Tweets. This never came to be. |
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| In this image we see an office worker phoning her boss to admit that she has deleted the spreadsheet, again. Yes, all 500 bytes of it. |
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| A typical man cave from the 1970s. This gaming setup includes a tape deck which later evolved into the 'restore point'. |
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| Early Facebook users from the 1970s would print out their friends profile pages and then spend their evening reading through them. If they 'liked' a post they would draw a little thumbs-up or heart next to it in red ink and send it back to them in the mail. |
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| Whenever someone made a copy-paste error in their spreadhseets in the 70s, they would telephone the debug man who would spend his evening rewiring the spreadsheet. Typically, the problem was fixed in time for another working day. |
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| Back in the 1970s storage devices were kept under lock and key. A specially trained technician would feed and train a small zoo of mice whose job it was to keep the spindle rotating high enough to achieve data transfer rates of up to 8 bits per second. It is from this practice that we get the computer terms 'mouse' and 'hard cheese'. |
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| An early storage device from the 1970s. This one was mainly used to store cat photos, as they still are today. |
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| A rare photograph showing early Tumblr memes being uploaded. |
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| There was always much excitement in the office whenever a new Linux distro came out. |
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| Back in the 1970s it was thought that the office of the future would involve desk after desk of office workers staring at their computer screens all day. Thankfully, this never happened. |
If you liked this post, then do please share it with your friend if you have one, alternatively you could look at this other post which has nothing to do with the one you just read, or look at a home computer from the 1980s.
