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Comment by Scalene2 | Hacker News Reader

I did the math for how much I would have spent on long distance during the pandemic if it was in 1970, it worked out to several hundred thousand dollars.

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Even without going back to 1970, there's an "interesting" question of how we would have adapted to the pandemic even 20 or 25 years ago. To me, it seems fairly obvious that we couldn't reasonably have just switched to WFH for an extended period--even leaving more expensive (albeit not 1970 levels) telephony charges out of the equation. Many, maybe the majority, of people were just getting dial-up Internet in the mid- to late-90s and basically none of the Internet services we take for granted today like Amazon existed until fairly late in that period.

I have been thinking about this on-and-off since I first read this on a blog somewhere - and all I can think is that we would have regged up higher phone bills, but probably we would have had to adapt more to working not just from home, but also async and we would have been better of for it.

Probably wouldn't have saved lettering, but it would likely have made faxes far more common in peoples homes - you can't have a meeting with your boss, but you can send him an update pretty easily.

In some ways I think it was our course that we had good enough technology to do WFH, but didn't get to take advantage of that to chance how we worked.

The pandemic is a (hopefully) once in a lifetime opportunity to change and we kinda wasted it.

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