Outline of a female executive assistant seated at the front desk of a retro office, with a smiling male executive in a business suit waiting for her to finish her phone call so he can ask her something.

How 15 minutes I spent with a laptop in 1991 created 2 FT jobs and a promotion

In a section of my dissertation, I dove into office gender politics of in the late 1940s, in order to explore just what Arthur Miller’s original audiences would have thought about the wire recorder that appears in Death of a Salesman. In the play, Willy Loman’s boss Howard thinks of the wire recorder as a domestic plaything, but at the time it was marketed as more reliable for taking dictation…