[drbw]

Pretty much - I started work before even internal email was a thing, so everything was done on paper. And often hand-written paper at that. Hell, I made the first Word template for a work-item ticket! Before that we had custom forms to fill out.

Even better, the developers worked in a different building to our users, so there would often be a couple of days lag to getting a response. If you needed a quicker answer, you had to phone them, or schedule a meeting if you needed to explain something in more detail.

[stan_rogers]

A person so inclined can still order interoffice routing envelopes ("hundred milers") from most stationers. For the yoots, those were string-tied manilla envelopes with twenty to one hundred little addressing boxes that be re-used until there was no more room to cross out the previous addressee and add a new one.

[chokma]

Found one of those in the stacks of papers from my father's time at IBM. Funny how paper-based information technology was back then - the first thing that comes to mind are the punch cards, but also later program listings were printed out a lot.

We used stacks of "endless paper" core dumps / assembler listings when painting rooms, as you could just unfold a huge stack of paper to protect the floor from paint splatters.

[japanuspus]

The model I used (less than 10 years ago) had a grid of punched holes so you could quickly tell if there was anything in it.

[skissane]

As recently as 2008, I actually used those interoffice routing envelopes to submit the receipts for my expense reports. Then they introduced a new process involving scan and email.

[thatfunkymunki]

this is still more or less how the US Air Force operates