“Typing was women’s work.” ∞

“Typing was women’s work.”

That links to a great little Atlantic article about why the 1st laptop, the GRiD Compass, was kind of a hard sell to the world’s manly men. Hint: it was not just the price.

(My mother, Susan Ingraham, worked in a typing pool for NASA — one of her first jobs, before she started her teaching career.)

So what changed? Why did laptops take off? When did male executives start typing?

I’m guessing that another manly trait started to compete for attention: the craving for cool toys. One little voice was saying, “That’s Shirley’s job! I couldn’t possibly!” while another little voice was whispering urgently, “Megahertz and RAM and hard drives, goody gumdrops! Oh, and it’s got a logic board — logic is super manly!” Plus, you could play Missile Command and it was obvious that, someday, probably not long after the invention of warp drive, you would have a phone that could make fart noises. Awesome.

But only if you embraced typing. And lo typing was accepted and then co-opted as a modern manly activity.