the telephone, IBM had turned down the photocopier when it was originally developed by Chester Carlson, a classic solo inventor who carried out his first experiments in an apartment above a Queens, New York, beauty parlor, in the 1930s.

1964: The Action Office The designer Robert Propst combined desk, storage unit, and wall into one piece, in an effort to provide a measure of privacy with an inexpensive, standardized product. The innovation lay in making the wall serve as a storage module and desk support. The format degenerated into the slap-up cubicle.

1967: The Office Landscape Eberhard and Wolfgang Schnelle, a team of German brothers, developed a concept of office planning based on patterns of communication rather than hierarchy. The result was an end to martial rows of identical desks in favor of oasis-like clusters of desks and file walls. Introduced at DuPont, the “Quickborner” system of office landscape came to be widely imitated.

1981: The IBM PC The personal computer, developed by hobbyists in the mid-1970s, was legitimized for business by the introduction of IBM’s personal computer, in 1981. It was ushered in with a memorable ad campaign based on images from Modern Times , Charlie Chaplin’s landmark 1936 film in which he attacked the inhumanity of modern manufacturing work. The Tramp’s IBM PC apparently enabled him to do without a desk at all, and the advertisements showed him free to roam about, his computer sitting atop a Saarinen-style “tulip” side table of the sort one would have found in the reception area, and not the working offices, of a 1960s Fortune 500 company. Beside the computer on the table was a single rose in a vase—a distant but distinct echo of 1960s “flower power.”

1984: The Apple The Macintosh brought the graphic interface and the computer mouse to the office, and, married to the laser printer, it gave birth to desktop publishing. But the paperless office that such computers were also supposed to herald soon proved an illusion. The new technology let people create and discard multiple drafts, prepare more records, and accumulate more paper than ever before.

1986: The Fax Machine Expensive early machines were in use by 1966, but the key moment came in the summer of 1986, when facsimile transmission became cheaper than international telex. The number of fax machines nearly doubled in the next two years. Fax , a new noun, soon became a verb as well.

1980s: The Laptop It began with costly efforts such as the Grid Compass of 1982, which cost $800 then and now can be found in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The laptop quickly became more widely available later in the decade, when prices fell. Now salesmen could scan spreadsheets —or play Space Invaders—during long airplane flights.

1989: Dilbert The comic strip takes as its setting the cube farms that descended from the Action Office of the 1960s, and it devotes itself to celebrating oddities

of the contemporary workplace, from the deluded boss spewing New Economy clichés to prairie-dogging, when cubicle residents pop up their heads at the latest rumor of layoffs.

1990s: The Virtual Office During the 1990s, the ascendancy of just-in-time production inspired a vogue for just-in-time office work. Employees could usefully work at home by telecommuting—25 million were doing so by 1993, twice as many as a decade before—or drop in at the office when needed for a specific project. The scheme was aimed both at occasional workers and ones who put in long hours in new high-tech industries. The best-known experiment in the virtual office was conducted by the advertising agency Chiat Day, in a Venice, California, building designed by the architect Frank Gehry. Workers there could seek inspiration in spaces variously called the “student union,” the “club room,” the “romper room,” and the “conference womb.” A set of Tilt-A-Whirl conference spaces was created in cars acquired from old amusement-park rides.

1994: The Aeron Chair Herman Miller’s office chair became ubiquitous in Silicon Valley and a symbol of the dot.com world. Its ergonomie design included a mesh seat that summed up the informality of the “new economy” culture: No leather or designer-chosen upholstery fabric here, but rather something newer and better, yet less pretentious.

—P. P.