October 23, 2005 - Evolution of the Office

October 23, 2005 - Evolution of the Office

When I first entered the workforce in the summer of 1967, as a technician for Bendix Field Engineering Corp. in Greenbelt, Maryland, I wore a suit and tie, the uniform of the day for white collar workers. I worked in an office at the giant NASA complex in Greenbelt, Maryland surrounded by trees—an almost rural setting. The office consisted of an air conditioned computer room with two Univac NTDS 1206 computers—originally built for shipboard use they still had “Battle Short” switches at the top to keep the computer running when the air conditioning stopped working. The two main Navy Gray metal chassis were nearly six feet tall and four feet wide with two doors that swung open to reveal 13 trays that rolled out like drawers to provide access to as many as 10 rows each with 40 slots, each slot containing one 2-in by 2-in. printed circuit card populated with transistor logic. The bottom five trays were devoted to what today would be DRAM memory but back then was tiny core memories—a whopping 32K. The top four trays handle I/O. The three trays below contained the central processor unit. And the one remaining tray was memory controller. The two computers were surrounded by large numbers of 9-track reel-to-reel tape drives—each the size of a refrigerator. There was also an oversized desk with a panel of lights and switches behind a work surface. And there was a teletype machine that provided keyboard and paper tape reader and paper tape punch—this is where technicians created test programs to exercise different parts of the computer during preventative maintenance. The rats nest of wires hooking all these different pieces of equipment were strewn about the area below the raised floor of the computer room, which was enclosed to keep the environment at a consistent temperature.

The offices where we worked were less impressive. Imagine a large room around which were gray metal desks located at intervals all along the four walls enclosing the space with each worker facing the wall, some with electric typewriters—I had one, an IBM with a golf ball print head, others had pen and pencil—all of us were shuffling papers. The room which began the day at 8:00 AM clean and fresh smelling from its nightly cleaning, would end the day in a haze of smoke, the circulating air unable to clear the inside of all the smoke from the pack-a-day smokers puffing away—me included. There was one retired navy Chief Petty Officer who arrived at the same time I did, who had quit smoking. He became my inspiration to give up the habit, though a severe cold that left me gasping for air for nearly a week helped facilitate the process. I quit smoking for the week with no nicotine hunger only relief that I could break. After recovering from my illness, I no longer craved the nicotine and I never went back. However, the retired nave CPO did resume smoking. Afterwards, I became the one lone non-smoker in a room that had me inhaling all the second hand smoke, nonetheless. Surprisingly, I was never tempted to resume the habit.

One element missing from this office was women, though there was a secretarial pool where documents were sent for typing and handling—mailing outside or within the company, filing in project folders, etc. One of their tasks was to prepare student packages for the many classes that the office held. We were continually training technicians on the existing and newly acquired equipment found on the many tracking sites that Bendix maintained worldwide—the Middle East, Spain, Australia, as well as a number of sites in the U.S. Training was ongoing because technicians would leave for better jobs and new hires had to be brought up to speed. In this environment, the secretarial pool was handling the paperwork associated with each of these students. And some of the denizens of my office were the instructors preparing the course materials or in my case preparing test procedures for the computer labs the students would have to accompany the course itself. The other element missing from this office was workers that weren’t white. In fact, I was the only person in the office that wasn’t completely white, though curiously I did not see that I was the odd man out.

All the time I worked at the NASA training center, the world outside was going through the turmoil of the last days of the Viet Nam War, the last days of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s second term as president, the last days of the social revolution that was the decade of the 1960s. Part of that revolution was for equality between male and female workers as well as equality among the races. That inequality was one of the great injustices the social revolution made right in the form of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And the act came into being at the hand of the most unlikely president in the White House: LBJ. I’ve often wondered if he pushed the passage of the act to ensure his place in history was not solely that of the president who landed us in the quagmire of the Viet Nam war. It’s a remarkable law in that it states clearly that “…it shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin...” It would take over ten years to realize the full potential of that act, but by the start of the 1980’s it had changed the office I worked in completely.

That office was on Mary Avenue in Sunnyvale, California, near the corner of Mary and West Fremont Avenue. It was relatively small with less than 10 people in the office. It was the West Coast office of the publishing company I worked for and it housed sales people and four editors. The sales staff was split among both men and women. The office manager was a woman as well as the receptionist and office clerk. The four editors were all men. In the home office in New Jersey, women comprised 20 percent of the staff and the editor of the publication was a woman. Equality among the races likewise accelerated with an ethnic and racial make up in many offices becoming increasing heterogeneous by the early 1980s. In the 1960s, I saw myself as part of the white work force and my co-workers saw me as one of them. While the world around me struggled for racial equality, I had created my own. A little over a decade later, that equality had become the norm for all skin colors.