When I was in high school in New York City in the 1960's, there was a department called Secretarial Studies that taught typing and shorthand (in two flavors, Gregg and Pitman). The students were mostly girls planning on looking for work as secretaries.
Well, recording machines changed the way people dictated letters (and computers of course changed it again), and nowadays the WSJ reports that you need a translator to recover the contents of old shorthand notes:Do You Know, Offhand, Anyone Who Knows Shorthand?As a Skill Fades, Translators Are in Demand; Ms. Sanders Charges 20.5 Cents a Word
It's probably also hard to find someone to repair buggy whips, not to mention recovering files stored in WordPerfect on floppy disks...
If anyone needs someone who once mastered Scribe (since displaced by TeX), let me know.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
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1 comment:
That is interesting, my wife and I were just discussing the other day why we both took typing. Her for the mandatory secretarial training, and me for key punch operating, which I don't suppose is coming back anytime soon.
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