Vintage Photos of Office Life Through the Years

The modern workplace may bring to mind images of open floor plans, “casual Fridays”, and Slack messages... but corporate America didn’t always look like this. Only a few decades ago, going to the office meant working out of a cubicle with cutting edge innovations such as typewriters, landline phones, and switchboards with operators directing calls. The advancement of technology and changes in work culture have truly transformed how we conduct business. Let’s take a look at how office life has evolved through the years...

Men sit at their desks by the window accompanied by two rows of secretaries next to them at an office in New York City. It was uncommon for women to have managerial roles at this time, and many who worked in offices served as secretaries.

Journalists at Reuters Press Agency crowd around a conference table as they receive results of the general election in November 1935. Huge piles of paper and editing everything by hand was commonplace in newsrooms at the time.

Two women gather around the cooler for a quick break to chat while having a drink of water. Throwback to when water cooler convos took place around actual water coolers!

Dressing up was a job requirement and casual Fridays were definitely out of the question. Employees were expected to wear formal clothing in professional settings, and there were different standards for men and women. Men sported suits and ties. Women dressed in blouses, wool suits, stockings, and stiletto heels -- peep toe heels or strappy sandals were considered unprofessional.

A man smokes a pipe while doing work on a typewriter, wearing a three-piece tweed suit. While this definitely looks like a scene out of an old movie, smoking was permitted in office settings until it was banned starting in the 1990's.

Before fax machines were connected to telephone lines, information was transferred via radio transmissions. The radio facsimile machine pictured here can print a 4-column newspaper with illustrations at the rate of 500 words per minute.

A row of switchboard operators connect calls by inserting a pair of phone plugs into the corresponding jacks appropriate for the call. While switchboard operators started off as a male-dominated role, employers soon realized the benefit of hiring women as they were patient, polite, and had more soothing voices (not to mention, they cost less to hire at the time).

Commercial typewriters were first introduced in 1874, but they were used well into the 1980's before being replaced by computers. Here, a secretary types up notes from a meeting using a mechanical typewriter.

Two young women are sorting computer punch cards in a room of filling cabinets. Long before files were digitized and available on the cloud, documents had to be carefully sorted and organized in a physical location. Workers need to stay on top of where everything is kept in order to maintain smooth operations at the office.

Adding machines are mechanical calculators that were ubiquitous in offices in the 1950's. They were often used for bookkeeping and were popular until the invention of modern day calculators and personal computers in the 1980's.

Before podcasts and social media scrolling were available to relieve us from boredom, commuters often passed the time by reading up on the news. Here, a businessman is flipping through a newspaper during his daily commute on the bus.

In this Chicago office, three employees work on IBM data processing machines, one of the first mass produced computers in the world. These machines were marketed for more general business purposes, and the advancement of technology from this point forward had a powerful impact on how companies conducted business.

IBM's technology for data storage was the industry standard at that time. The earliest IBM tape drives, such as the IBM 729II computer tape storage system pictured on the right, were mechanically sophisticated drives that allowed for the tape to start and stop quickly. The woman is working on a teletype machine, an early computer terminal that was used to transfer typed information through an electrical communications channel.

Women started joining the workforce in the 1960's in management positions and other roles that were typically held by men. Prior to this shift, only unmarried, single women were likely to be employed, but throughout the 60's and 70's, married women with children sought employment at an unprecedented rate.

A technician works with a computer printer and the big rolls of paper these machines required. Moving into the 1970's, dot-matrix printers and line printers were the most common types for general use, and many innovations of that time led to the modern day printers we use today.

Computer punch card sorting machines were popularized by IBM and made processing and organizing information much easier. Card sorters placed punch cards into a selected pocket by reading the information on the first line.

Computers were becoming more prevalent, but the technology of the time did not allow them to be very compact - oftentimes, entire rooms were dedicated to store mainframe computing equipment. Here, a man sits at the computer work station for a mainframe data information system manufactured by Radio Corporation of America (RCA).

Trolley service was a common sight in office buildings in the 70's. Tea ladies wheeled around a cart of mugs, coffee, tea, and refreshments. Many office workers befriended the tea ladies that served them and exchanged stories and office gossip. This was surely a highlight of the work day!

Imagine an entire office taking calls all from the same conference room. For many office workers in the 70's, this was the only option as all phone lines were tied to the same phone jack.

As personal computers became more common, Apple and IBM raced to produce the best machine for general use. Featuring floppy disk drives, clacky keyboards, and low resolution graphics, these early computers revolutionized how we work and ushered in the modern era of office technology.

A businessman uses a Hewlett-Packard laptop during his commute by train. HP's first laptop computer was an industry breakthrough, weighed 8.5 lbs, and cost nearly $3,000 - a hefty price tag for its time!

A banker working on the trading floor takes a call at his desk in a set-up that looks pretty familiar to present-day office life. The financial sector relies on technology and the rise of computing to manage day-to-day tasks such as compiling financial data, organizing the data in charts and graphs, and running complex transactions.

With the tech boom of Silicon Valley, modern offices are now competing to offer the coolest perks and best workplaces. From free employee cafeterias to arcades and rock climbing walls, companies today aim to create a fun work environment that employees enjoy spending time in.

Co-working and hot desking, a trend in which workers take whatever desk is available without having one assigned to them, is now a popular option for startups and small businesses. With companies such as WeWork, entrepreneurs and small businesses no longer have to worry about managing an office for themselves and are able to join a collaborative community that provides a workspace with high speed Internet, mail services, and plenty of coffee.

With the coronavirus pandemic leading to shutdowns in major cities around the world, companies in industries that are able to turn to working from home have many of their employees logging on remotely. With technology keeping us close together, video conference services such as Zoom are now a part of our every day lives.