Beginning of the End From the 1950s through the 1970s, the mini recorder appeared in numerous advertisements, movies, and TV shows as a standard accessory for the successful businessman type. Dictaphone offered a “Travel-Master” Dictabelt recorder that ran on rechargeable batteries in the early 1950s, and Soundscriber also made a battery operated vinyl disk recorder. But the really successful products used magnetic tape.
Norelco (Philips) tape-based dictation machine
The 1960s saw the last big surge in interest in dictation equipment, but also the entrance of non-U.S. firms to the American market. Having recovered their consumer electronics manufacturing capability in the 1950s, German, English, and Scandinavian firms entered the U.S. market with low cost office recorders. While most of them lacked the features of the traditional equipment, they appealed to many smaller offices where there was no need for typing pools and standardization of equipment. The miniature, portable recorder also continued to evolve, and an important development was the standardization of the recording medium. The Philips company of the Netherlands, which already had a line of dictation equipment, also introduced a “general purpose” tape cartridge introduced in 1962, which they called the Compact Cassette. It was not intended to compete with their dictation equipment, but many manufacturers of dictation machines adopted it.
Lanier-branded cassette dictation machine
Japanese companies were particularly aggressive in adopting the Philips cassette standard and its successor, the microcassette, as the basis of miniature business recorders. A Dictaphone ad from the 1970s (pictured below) illustrates the shrinking of portable dictation devices and the continuing “executive dictating on the go” theme touted by manufacturers. Note the way men are still portrayed as the ones who make recordings.
An important development of the 1970s was the attempt to merge computers and dictation equipment. In 1960, a new company entered the market– the computer giant IBM. The company purchased the Peirce Wire Recorder company, which had been working on a new magnetic belt recorder to replace its wire recording equipment. IBM had a large and powerful sales and service organization, and soon took about half the U.S. market.
While the computer would have a huge impact on the dictation machine, it was not what anyone expected. Computers had been used by companies since the 1950s and they were becoming more and more important in daily operations. Early on, large companies installed computers for billing, accounting, and similar data processing jobs. Then, IBM and others introduced the concept of “word processing,” which automated routing typing operations. IBM’s engineers tried to make dictation equipment the “input” for word processing equipment, even speculating that voice recognition systems could replace much of the letter-writing process. But the real effect of word processing was to change the way that secretaries and letter-writers did their correspondence.
Technical problems have prevented voice recognition from replacing all typing, though the technology is improving. Word processing, however, virtually eliminated the large transcription pools and the use of the dictating machine for cranking out large volumes of letters. There went the major market for equipment. The remaining users were executives with private secretaries, but these had always been the most resistant customers. Ironically, with the coming of personal computers in the 1980s, the remaining users for dictation machines–and the remaining jobs for stenographers–both went into decline.