The first three years were with one of the major insurance companies of its day, Continental Insurance Company. I still remember the corporate address being 80 Maiden Lane in New York. My first office was at 1810 Commerce Street in Dallas, in what was known as the Mercantile-Continental Building. The first title I had was Supervisor of Premium Finance. My department was thirteen women and me. It was some learning experience, to say the least.
It is crazy how much things have changed since then. There were computers, but they were in a climate controlled room to themselves. There were no PC's on the desks throughout our department, just adding machines and a rotary dial phone. There was a transcription department if you needed to write a letter, and you could access the department and dictate over the rotary dial phone. You could review what you had dictated by dialing a number, and then you dialed another number to close your dictation. In about a day the letter would be delivered for your signature in inter-office mail.
The first PC I ever used was in about 1982. It was an IBM PC-XT. I remember it had a 10 megabyte hard drive and probably 256kb RAM. The monitor weighed about 40 pounds and was a square green monochrome view. When we got it, the vendor said we would never fill up the 10 megabyte hard drive.
We've seen computers evolve to the point that it would be hard to get by without them, and I'm writing this blog on a Chromebook...every keystroke is being recorded in the cloud...somewhere....
