[ Retro Scan of the Week ] The Age of Data Entry

Monday, August 13th, 2012

IMS International 5000 IS Desktop Mainframe Advertisement - 1983The IMS 5000IS: Your Key to Office Neck Pain

It’s almost amusing to recall the days when secretarial computer work mostly involved data entry and/or printing. (In this case, data entry inspired the neck-cramping computer setup seen here.) Both of those activities were designed to bridge the world of the computer and the world of paper.

By the mid-1990s, the introduction of low-cost scanners paired with optical character recognition (OCR) software helped relieve the tedium of typing in paper-bound data by hand.

Today, such scanning happens far less frequently, as most text-based data originates in the computer space to begin with. And many times it stays there, too: office workers regularly publish data electronically to the Internet or share it over local networks and email, making routine printing (and routine data entry) far more uncommon tasks in the year 2012 than they were in the 1990s.

See Also: The Too-Personal Computer (2010)

[ From Interface Age, May 1983, p.90 ]

Discussion Topic of the Week: Was there ever a time when you were forced to do lots of manual data entry? Tell us about it.

[ Retro Scan of the Week ] The Too-Personal Computer

Monday, April 5th, 2010

IMS International Ad - 1983“Is your personal computer TOO personal?”

Facetious 1980s computer manual quote: “Never operate a computer with the monitor sitting directly in front of you. Neck torsion increases muscle tone and blood flow to the brain, resulting in higher computing performance.”

[ From Interface Age, November 1983, p.13 ]

Discussion Topic of the Week: Have you ever been forced to share a PC with someone else? Tell us about it.