The Historian’s Notebook: Back to the ‘Office of the Future!’

The Historian’s Notebook: 50 Years of Business & Society is a blog series created in preparation for the 50th anniversary of Yale SOM in September 2026. The series is written by Yale SOM’s resident historian, Michelle Spinelli. Reach out if you have an idea for a blog post, memories or photos to share, or an inquiry about SOM history.

It’s hard to imagine a time when we weren’t all pecking away at our laptops—in class, at the office, at home, in the library, in Starbucks, on the train. And forget about mobile phones! But that time wasn’t so long ago. It was only in 1981 that IBM released the first personal computer to become popular and widely available, revolutionizing how we work and communicate.

Yale SOM was one of the earliest beneficiaries of the new technology. The school received 50 personal computers from IBM in 1983, only two years after the machine’s introduction. It was the initial step in a three-year collaborative project between IBM and SOM, with the school’s faculty meant to develop a core course on the personal computer and eventually to integrate its use into the curriculum. At the conclusion of the project, SOM would share with IBM and other universities the curricula and learning materials its faculty had created.

The new core course, taught by finance professor Philip Dybvig, was called Management with a Personal Computer. Other courses that were modified to accommodate computer applications included Small Business Management with a Personal Computer, led by professor of accounting Paul Berney, and Competitive Business Strategies with a Personal Computer, taught by Sharon Oster, a professor of economics and management and the school’s future dean.

While personal computers at schools and offices presented myriad possibilities for making work faster, easier, and more efficient, they also created new challenges, especially regarding communications. In 1981, Judith Stein, who had directed SOM’s communications program alongside Marya Holcombe since the school’s opening, noted in an internal newsletter that “automated communications” would require different skills, including the ability to engage with an audience in such a way that individuals could “follow the logic of an argument in a limited display of a computer terminal screen.”

In a letter to the New York Times in December 1982, the pair warned that what was then called “electronic mail” would become “nothing more than a costly replacement for a scribbled note or a hasty phone call” if managers didn’t learn to “apply principles of effective communication.” They also provided a prescient caution about “videoconferencing”—which in 1982 meant dedicated equipment connecting conference rooms rather than Zoom calls between PCs—arguing that it would just provide an “expensive” venue for “incoherent arguments that demand time-consuming explanations.”

Stein and Holcombe advised using highlighting techniques like bullets, headlines, and underlining to help managers navigate documents they viewed on a computer screen. As for “the sterile atmosphere of a teleconference,” they recommended the “judicious repetition of key points.”

Long before email overload and endless video calls, Stein and Holcombe warned of the essential tension of digital work, concluding, “Managers must be literate, not merely computer literate, if the office of the future is to live up to its potential.”