<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

<p>Until the late nineteenth century the British Civil Service relied on handwritten documents which were hand copied by armies of clerks and filed. The next stage was that handwritten documents were copied by armies of typists and then filed. The third stage was that documents were, largely, typed by their authors and distributed via email or other means, at which point the system of filing seems to have broken down. The two major inflection points were roughly 100 years apart, and both the move to the typewriter and the move to email were motivated by a wish to save money.</p>
</abstract>

Until the late nineteenth century the British Civil Service relied on handwritten documents which were hand copied by armies of clerks and filed. The next stage was that handwritten documents were copied by armies of typists and then filed. The third stage was that documents were, largely, typed by their authors and distributed via email or other means, at which point the system of filing seems to have broken down. The two major inflection points were roughly 100 years apart, and both the move to the typewriter and the move to email were motivated by a wish to save money.

The Motives for and Consequences of the Introduction of Typewriters and Word Processing in the British Civil Service

Administory

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Until the late nineteenth century the British Civil Service relied on handwritten documents which were hand copied by armies of clerks and filed. The next...

The Motives for and Consequences of the Introduction of Typewriters and Word Processing in the British Civil Service

Published Online: Dec 14, 2022

Page range: 219 - 232

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/adhi-2022-0005

© 2022 Michael Moss et al., published by Sciendo

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.