Brief History Of The Post-It

May 7th, 2005 · No Comments

Seeing as the humble Post-It is now 25 years old, The Rake has taken the opportunity to write a fascinating piece on it. Excerpt:

Once upon a time, the American office was a nightclub with typewriters—at least according to mid-century myths like The Hucksters or The Apartment. Formal dress was mandatory. Client meetings had a two-drink minimum and every plush blond secretary was as tightly tufted as a Florence Knoll lounge chair. On occasion, there were papers to shuffle, bosses to placate, but ultimately all it took to succeed in this hectic but undemanding middle-management Eden was a crisp white collar, a bottle of aspirin, and an aptitude for caustic banter. This was the American workplace. Alas, once the mid-sixties rolled around, innovative geeks started ruining everything. Secretaries gave way to Xerox machines, calculators, mainframes, terminals, personal computers, and fax machines. Private offices were subdivided into cubicles. Steel desks as solid as tanks were replaced by cheap particleboard workstations and an ever-expanding tangle of incompatible beige devices. It was enough to drive one to drink, but office life perversely had become far too complex to negotiate with a hangover. Even goofing off required a user manual.

On April 6, 1980, though, the endless and complicated march of progress took a short break as a remarkable new technology arrived in stationery stores around the nation. It was so simple to use, even a CEO could master it. It was so perfectly designed, it didn’t require semi-annual upgrades. It was so versatile, it actually performed better than advertised. It was the Post-it Note.

Two and a half decades later, as the little yellow notes celebrate their silver anniversary, it’s easy to forget what a recent innovation they are. Thanks to their material simplicity, they seem more closely related to workplace antiquities like the stapler and the hole-punch than integrated chips. Instead, they’re an exemplary product of their time. Foreshadowing the web, they offered an easy way to link one piece of information to another in a precisely contextual way. Foreshadowing email, they made informal, asynchronous communication with your co-workers a major part of modern office life.