Once upon a time, there was a thing called a Typing Pool. Employees, largely women, would sit at these circular desks and produce duplicate copies of letters and memos on typewriters. While carbon paper was available, it was often necessary to type the same letter to many people, so each letter was typed out as many times as recipients were needed. Get Adjustable Computer Desk here.

As you can imagine, this is harder and cost more to accomplish than one clerical employee using Microsoft Word with mail merge functionality.

Once upon a time, accountants used analog calculators and pencils to work out complicated budgets and recorded vast amounts of data into huge spreadsheets. Spreadsheets were literal sheets that spread across many columns and filled an entire desk. Volumes of data could weigh ten or twenty pounds depending on the nature and amount of data needed.

If you wanted to see billing information from a few years back, you had to go into a library of spreadsheet binders and leaf through these massive books to find your data - and it was up to the brainpower of the accountants and clerks to ensure the accuracy of the calculations. One error could create a tsunami of errors down the line and create a nightmare for the number-nerds to sift through and correct by hand and “stubby pencil work.”

As you can imagine, this is less desirable than using Microsoft Excel which not only saves the information but allows anyone with or without an Accounting background to apply formulas and verify data across a powerful, digital spreadsheet.

As lately as the 2000s, presentations were printed upon particular transparency sheets one page at a time. A presenter would stand beside an overhead projector - just a simple contraption that shone a big lamp up through the transparency bounced the light off a couple of mirrors, and onto a wall big enough for people to see.

That person would place each slide on the projector, present the information, and then swap it out for the next slide. Each transparency cost about a dollar to print, or $2.50 in today's money. Digital projectors were in their infancy and were cost-prohibitive. However, in the last few years, cell phones have developed technology to project images so you can project a PowerPoint presentation onto any wall from the palm of your hand saving time and money.

From the early 1980s to today, the history of computers shows how technology made information portable and accessible across the world where it was once trapped on paper and required someone to move it from place to place. Taking an entire room to calculate 5 kilobytes of information to the struggle for a laptop that weighed less than a typical suitcase, to the rise of eCommerce, technology has not put workers on the street so much as opened a new industry for people to develop and support technology, not just operate it.