

The Jobs Of Yesteryear: Obsolete Occupations - ern
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124251060

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AngryParsley
_After 1900, when so-called artificial ice became generally accepted as safe,
mass quantities were produced at ice plants and delivered to homes._

That's so bizarre. I would have thought people in the past preferred man-made
ice as soon as it was invented. Who would want ice from a frozen lake? Lakes
are full of all kinds of gross stuff.

I guess I'll have to remember that fact when people argue about the
superiority of naturally-derived products.

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ndl
The idea of a typist pool intrigues me. It reminds me of the concept of a
thread pool or connection pool, the idea being that one has many instances of
a certain resource to share distribute over requests. Rudimentary parallelism
and task scheduling seem to have existed since the dawn of history, when
humans congregated in sufficient numbers to organize labor en masse.

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keefe
soon to be added...

data entry specialist - at the dawn of modern computing in the late 20th
century, data integration was so difficult that companies often employed
entire teams of people to type in hardcopy of output from other computer
systems.

