Another social change most people younger than 35 or so don’t really remember is that most people in the workplace above mid-level manager and anyone with a white-collar job never really typed anything before 1996 or so.

They had assistants for that, and there used to be many, many more assistants than there are now.

I recall going to my e-mail training at Bingham with any number of other attorneys [where] they would teach you, for example, how to compose a new e-mail, [starting with] how to populate the “to” box. We sort of learned our e-mail addresses as a code—it’s going to be your first name with a period, your last name, an “at” sign, and so on. Immediately people said, “Well, I’m not gonna type in all those letters!” Because nobody really typed 20 years ago. You have to bear in mind—at that time, we had assistants for that. And so the idea of having to type all those letters into a “to” box—like, that was a challenge at the time! And then you had to actually type the message? If you compare that to picking up a dictaphone, talking into a dictaphone and handing a tape to an assistant to transcribe and send—it was just a world apart.

That’s an almost-unimaginable world now, especially to people who didn’t live through it. I caught the tail end of it and watched it all change.

In 1990 it would’ve been unthinkable for anyone in any white-collar job to type his or her own memos; by 1999 it had become de rigeur and 90% of assistants had disappeared from the workplace.

Another very rapid and very unremarked social change.