In living memory, every account statement was handcrafted by artisans. Goodness have we forgotten that. Floors upon floors of clerks, patiently adding up numbers in a fashion to MS Excel, except with added ability to have your life savings (temporarily) disappear to math errors.
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(It is broadly underappreciated in tech that e.g. A/B testing, including statistical confidence testing on it, predates computers.)
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This is just amazing to me in so many ways: the desired and delivered customer experience in the early days: Operator: "Thank you for calling Charles Schwab." A retail customer: "My account number is [7 digits]. 2,000 shares of IBM at limit of 57. *disconnects from call*"
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And a few hours later Schwab would call you back: Operator: "Filled 1,000 shares of IBM at 57; one left. Is this correct?"
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They did material work in call centers to specialize such that e.g. only operators with broker licenses took orders, but since they were expensive, if you called and asked for a quote ("What is IBM trading at?") you got routed to effectively (cheap, tier 1) CS.
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Perhaps you already know about the book scientific advertising: Mail order advertising is traced down to the fraction of a penny. The cost per reply and cost per dollar of sale show up with utter exactness. https://www.scientificadvertising.com/ScientificAdvertising.pdf …
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This came out in 1923.
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There’s probably something to be said that slower data collection and synthesis with fewer channels made it far more likely you’d commit to memory.
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