In the 1980s, it was expected that every child would learn how to use a com­puter for word pro­cess­ing, if not pro­gram­ming, so they had a chance in the com­ing Infor­ma­tion Age. But while school boards were push­ing to get a com­puter in front of every kid, com­puter com­pa­nies were hav­ing a heck of a time get­ting them into the office. IBM’s name brought them a mea­sure of suc­cess, but per­sonal com­put­ers were still a hard sell for a fledg­ling industry.

Just imag­ine, there used to be rooms of trained typ­ists, secretaries…call them what you will. They typed up hand­writ­ten notes and recorded dic­ta­tion with all the right for­mat­ting and few, if any, errors. These typ­ing pools seem so quaint now, but back then typ­ing was some­thing you went to school for and even got cer­ti­fied in! The flip side of this, though, was that few other peo­ple in the busi­ness world knew how to type them­selves. And they didn’t see the point in own­ing some­thing that promi­nent fea­tured a key­board and came with sofware to do word pro­cess­ing. They wanted some­thing they could con­trol as eas­ily as their TV set, or even talk to.

[…]it’s worth not­ing that back in 1979 peo­ple viewed the key­board as an imped­i­ment to using com­put­ers. After all, only sec­re­taries could type and the rest of us need to be able to talk to the com­puter. Hence the decades spent on try­ing to get com­put­ers to under­stand speech.

- Bob Frankston, Imple­ment­ing VisiCalc

Visi­Calc is regarded as the first “killer app”, replac­ing days’ worth of man­ual cal­cu­la­tions with what we now know as an elec­tronic “spread­sheet”. Lotus 1−2−3 built more business-​oriented func­tion­al­ity into the same basic inter­face. By work­ing with num­bers instead of words, math instead of gram­mar, these appli­ca­tions helped land early Apple IIs and IBM PCs on employee’s desks. Some even brought their own com­put­ers from home in order to take advan­tage of these time-​saving miracles.

Early Mac­in­tosh sales brochures

Mice and Graph­i­cal User Inter­faces fur­thered com­put­ers’ accep­tance into offices around the world by tak­ing the focus away from the key­board. Early Mac­in­tosh brochures rarely showed the key­board on the cover, focussing instead on its friendly “face” and its mouse. But Microsoft and oth­ers soon brough such ease-​of-​use to x86 PCs, and both camps invested heav­ily in suites of office soft­ware, empow­er­ing exec­u­tives to cre­ate doc­u­ments on their own.

So where’s the rel­e­vance to mod­ern com­put­ing? Join me next week for Covox, Siri, and Beyond. Until then, this pro­mo­tional video from Microsoft demon­strates what hap­pens when exec­u­tives have the capa­bil­ity of mak­ing their own busi­ness doc­u­ments. This really hap­pened. Every­where. It was kinda creepy.