Working at Home - 1974

Home Office - 1974

We like to think the Internet made working from home possible, but people have always worked AT home. I ran across these old photos as I was scanning a tray of old slides from 1974. Today, of course, most of the things you see here have been replaced.

The typewriter has been replaced by the word processor. The desk calendar has moved to my phone. The gray container is a humidor that held a set of technical drafting pens.  Drafting moved to Computer Aided Design. Even the pencils play a much smaller role today. None of the classrooms where I teach have pencil sharpeners. I seldom use pencils outside of my workshop.

There is an HP-45 calculator setting atop the book. It's just out of the frame to the right. It was the closest thing to a computer at the time. The first computer kit (The Altair) would be introduced the following year and "Personal Computers" wouldn't really become useful for for another decade. The Internet wouldn't be generally available until several years after that.

Bathroom/Darkroom

Lightroom and Photoshop have replaced the darkroom you see in photo to the left.  (The enlarger is covered to protect it from dust.)

My only phone was wired to the wall in the kitchen. I hadn't yet had an extension phone installed in the office. Cell phones wouldn't be around for several years.

Things have certainly changed. The Technical pens, calculator, typewriter and darkroom equipment cost about $10,000 in today's dollars. Now, I could do the work of all of these tools on a relatively inexpensive laptop computer. If I tried hard enough I could do most of the work on my phone.  GS