Over the years I have accumulated a collection of business cards. I have cards for most of the positions I’ve occupied, but there are a few gaps. For example, the years 1984-1994 are missing. May be they will turn up.
What follows is a brief history of change suggested or visible through the business card.
1979-1982:
NCR was my first job after graduating University. The key observation was the card did not include my name. This either reflected my junior position or the cost management practices of the organization. It also suggests (and it was true) that the telephone number was not a direct line to me. Callers would have to speak first to the switchboard and ask for me by name. A layer of protection or may be control; I didn’t get a lot of calls. Not like now.
The other observation is the card is in portrait, which is really only artistically significant, but it’s the only time I had a card in this style.
1982 – 1984
My Second job was with Victor Technologies. I now had a name on the card, a direct line and a Telex number. The Telex Machine was for sending text messages. Unlike today’s text messages they were not limited to 140 characters. The message was printed out on paper rolls loaded into the machine. However the telex machine was not portable either, and was hosted in a shared area, frequently with the photocopiers. I don’t recall ever receiving a telex.
While the company continues to exist, one day in early 1984, when I arrived, at the front door of the head office in Cambridge were three fellows, two in suites and one in trades cloths. The latter was working on the lock of the front door. Later that morning we were informed the company was in receivership and we were soon to be out of a job. My wife’s maternity leave was coming close to an end. I called her up and suggested she might want to return. Her first day back at work two weeks later was my first day out of a job.
1984-1994
For these years a gap exists. I did work, but I just don’t have the cards to prove it. May I will find them.
1995-1996
There are a couple things to notice on this card. First, the inclusion of a Fax number, although the fax had been around a while, I just don’t have those cards.
Second is the internet e-mail address. This is early on the adoption curve, so the corporate e-mail systems were not exposed to the world, or more precisely the internet. At this time a third-party e-mail address was used for that channel.
1996-1998
In this next iteration of cards we see the introduction of corporate support for internet e-mail, although the format is a bit funky reflecting the newness of the internet e-mail address formats and a lack of best practices.
1998-2002
This card shows progress in formatting the e-mail address to one that is more commonly used today. It also introduces the ‘dot’ notation for telephone numbers. A not so subtle reference to the IP numbers of the internet and this period of “dot-everything.”
Not shown here is the PIN number used to enable point-to-point instant messaging. I never included that number on my card because I considered it private.
The other observation is the then-current trend in the financial services industry to rebrand their systems groups. The thinking was to make this arm of the business be more dynamic etc.
2012 – Present day
In this last iteration one sees the return to a more traditional style of formatting for the telephone number although with the advent of 10-digit dialling for local calls the idea of a separate area code is meaningless and thus so are the parentheses. The other notable change is the removal of the Fax number. A legacy technology, replaced by e-mail which can transmit an image if one is necessary. Further, the tendency of most documents being in electronic form from start to end, printing them off just to fax them makes no sense. My office has one file for paper documents. It is empty.
Other than the gaps I noted above, I have a stack of many old cards, may be a few hundred. I won’t be handing them out. But they won’t go to waste; I’ll use them as bookmarks.
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