Locked stationery cupboards and other memories of the relatively recent past

If you want to measure how quickly technology has changed, just ask someone aged 60 about how their industry operated when they first signed up. You’ll be instantly transported into an almost unimaginable country — full of lead pencils, locked stationery cupboards and paperwork that had to be completed before you dared make one of those expensive interstate phone calls.

The Herald sub-editors’ desk, seen here in 1968, hadn’t changed much by the time Richard Glover got there in 1983.Credit: SMH

This week, The Sydney Morning Herald celebrated its 190th anniversary. Apart from The Times of London, it’s the oldest metropolitan newspaper in the English-speaking world. I started there in 1863. At least that’s what it felt like.

It was a world of manual typewriters, carbon paper and a method of printing in which every line of text was cast afresh out of a lead alloy and then screwed into a piece of wooden formwork.

No, truly.

Across industries, it’s worth collecting these memories of the relatively recent past. So many of us have experienced a huge serve of technological transformation.

In truth, it was 1983 when I started at the Herald. (See byline picture below. I was thinner then.) That means I’ve been writing for the paper for a fifth of its history – a bit short of Ross Gittins, who has been there for almost a quarter of those 190 years.

I was shown to a desk in a large open newsroom, much like a school gymnasium, and given a large clunky typewriter. I wasn’t to use normal paper to type my stories, but was instead directed to a huge pile of what looked like oblong booklets. These consisted of eight pages of paper, separated by carbon paper, glued together at the top.

The reporter would pound out a story, two paragraphs per booklet, the carbon paper producing eight copies of each sheet. A story of say 32 paragraphs would use up 16 booklets. Well, 17 because the first paragraph was allowed to occupy its own page.

Story completed, you’d find a spare desk, tear off the glued connecting strip, and create eight tiny stacks of paper, which you would then pin together with an actual pin.

Richard Glover in 1983.Credit: Fairfax Media

One of the fun parts of remembering the past is to recall the origin of the tech terms we use all the time. A pin wasn’t just a thing on Twitter or Pinterest. It was an actual pin. Often I pricked my finger doing the “pinning”. And would “bleed”. Or as we called it, bleed.

You’d then take your pinned-together eight copies, and hit “cc” by using what we called a series of “mailboxes”, which we called mailboxes. They were made of wood. There was one copy for the editor, one for the chief sub, one for The West Australian newspaper and so on.

The sub-editor would edit your copy, using a pretty aggressive version of “track changes” involving a red biro. There was no “hide changes”: it was apparent to all, including the printers, how your words had been improved.

The printers, who laboured one floor below, were sent your story by pneumatic tube. Placed in a canister, it was sucked up to the ceiling and shot to the other side of the building before heading to the floor below.

A linotype operator would unpack the cannister and key your words into a towering machine, in which each line of type would be cast in molten lead, emerging as a thin slug of metal, bristling with tiny, raised letters.

Over the next 15 years, that whole world disappeared – the typewriters, the linotype machines, the “copy takers” who’d transcribe stories phoned in by reporters in the field. By then, I’d left to join the world of radio, where the digital revolution was yet to arrive.

In 1996, when I started at the ABC, an interview would be recorded on reel-to-reel tape. If any cuts were needed, the tape would be cut using a razor blade, the two ends then stuck together with a thin sticky connector. If many cuts were involved, care had to be taken when hitting “rewind” that the whole thing didn’t fall apart.

A record was kept of the programs, presumably for legal reasons: each program placed onto two cassette tapes which were then gaffer-taped into bricks and stored in giant filing cabinets.

I know I sound like an ancient cobbler. A telephonist perhaps, or gnarled blacksmith. “Gather around, children, and let me tell you about a disappeared world.”

The truth is that such stories can be told by anyone who’s been in almost any trade for more than a few decades. And, in a few years’ time, today’s newcomers will be able to tell similarly unlikely tales.

“We went to work in the middle of town. We travelled there, all crowded together, on a thing called a bus. Everyone had to arrive at the same time, and we weren’t allowed to leave until at 6pm. Oh, and guess what — the childcare cost more than you were paid.”

Oh, how the eyes of the tomorrow’s young will gleam in surprise. Like those of today, they will listen to the tales of the past and experience all sorts of emotion: disbelief, wonder and, hopefully, just a bit of pity.