Anonymous
02/23/2026 23:09
Subject: When was first time you heard of someone working from home?
I worked for a tech company in LA from 1999-2003. We had sales reps across the country who either worked in regional offices or at home. At our headquarters, we had a lot of people who would work from home one day a week, so they wouldn't have to "come over the hill" from the Valley and deal with traffic. We referred to it as WFH, not WAH.
Anonymous
02/23/2026 22:26
Subject: When was first time you heard of someone working from home?
2008. My boss worked from home once a week. I remember not wanting to call her because "she was at home". It was so foreign to me.
Anonymous
02/23/2026 22:16
Subject: When was first time you heard of someone working from home?
1992 a fairly senior person at a research consulting firm. She'd helped to start the office and wanted to move. They wanted to keep her so worked out this arrangement. This was pre email/intranet so it was a lot of phone calls, fax machine, FedEx. This was the first place I worked after college.
Anonymous
02/23/2026 21:03
Subject: When was first time you heard of someone working from home?
Late 90s. My company has multiple offices in the Northeast, and by that time it wasn’t unusual for certain teams to be located in different offices, so you only see some of your team once a couple of months and almost all the meetings were done by phone. Once the email and internet were available at home, you could get a WFH arrangement if your boss was OK with it.
Weirdly enough, with the post Covid RTO mandates, the people who had long standing WFH arrangements also got swept back into the office.
Weirdly enough, with the post Covid RTO mandates, the people who had long standing WFH arrangements also got swept back into the office.
Anonymous
02/23/2026 21:03
Subject: When was first time you heard of someone working from home?
Anonymous wrote:In my case it was my Friend at IBM in 1992. 34 years ago. He had a 200 foot phone cord to hook to phone in house so he could use laptop by pool with dial up. He also had a beeper.
His rule was he had to be within 2 hours of work and able to get there in a suit on work from home days. I recall he sit by pool on a Friday weekday at our Hamptons house till 3 pm with suit hung up and ready to go. By 3 pm imposible to call him with two hour rule. And they only called him once in two years and that was night before he found out and just took LIRR in
I did not get it 25 years later in 2017
My dad started a business after a career in public policy/academia at age 50 in 1993. His office was one of the upstairs bedrooms then moved to the renovated barn on my parents' property. My mom was a teacher and carried the health insurance. Business is still going now and my dad is 85!
Anonymous
02/23/2026 20:52
Subject: When was first time you heard of someone working from home?
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:My dad was a scientist at a national lab run by the University of California.
Late in the 1970s was the first time he brought home a modem terminal with built-in keyboard and printer.
The printer printed out a log of all the commands you typed into the keyboard and the information that was being returned through the modem.
The modem connected to our home phone and communicated with a supercomputer.
I believe my dad brought it home so he could kick off big computing jobs that took a long time to run, read the results, and kick off new jobs. So it was a home for the evening/weekend thing. But it was definitely work brought home.
I also remember my dad making business phone calls while on vacation. And sometimes we stopped by labs where he had business while we were doing car vacations (New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania). There were some permeable boundaries.
I think laptops had the most to do with wfh. When I only had desktops in the 1990s, I could stay home to read reports but that wasn't really a full day's work.
In the 1980s my dad had an Apple computer that was like a box/cube and he had a cube-shaped backpack type thing to carry it in. It looked like a big soft-sided cooler. Anyone remember these? He brought that home from work some weekends.
I bet that was the Apple 2c! It was considered “portable” because it came with a handle, lol. My parents bought me one when I was in high school.
PP here. I just looked it up. It was before the Apple 2c came out. He had the Mac Classic which came with a carrying case!
PP again. My post was wrong. It couldn't have been the Mac Classic because it was earlier than that. 1980s for sure.
It wasn't the Steve Jobs NeXT cube was it? That's what he did when he left Apple.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTcube
https://www.storiesofapple.net/steve-jobs-next-computer.html
It was the Macintosh 128k. I looked it up and that’s what he had, got it in 1984 or so when it came out.
Anonymous
02/23/2026 20:49
Subject: When was first time you heard of someone working from home?
Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:Anonymous wrote:My dad was a scientist at a national lab run by the University of California.
Late in the 1970s was the first time he brought home a modem terminal with built-in keyboard and printer.
The printer printed out a log of all the commands you typed into the keyboard and the information that was being returned through the modem.
The modem connected to our home phone and communicated with a supercomputer.
I believe my dad brought it home so he could kick off big computing jobs that took a long time to run, read the results, and kick off new jobs. So it was a home for the evening/weekend thing. But it was definitely work brought home.
I also remember my dad making business phone calls while on vacation. And sometimes we stopped by labs where he had business while we were doing car vacations (New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania). There were some permeable boundaries.
I think laptops had the most to do with wfh. When I only had desktops in the 1990s, I could stay home to read reports but that wasn't really a full day's work.
In the 1980s my dad had an Apple computer that was like a box/cube and he had a cube-shaped backpack type thing to carry it in. It looked like a big soft-sided cooler. Anyone remember these? He brought that home from work some weekends.
I bet that was the Apple 2c! It was considered “portable” because it came with a handle, lol. My parents bought me one when I was in high school.
PP here. I just looked it up. It was before the Apple 2c came out. He had the Mac Classic which came with a carrying case!
PP again. My post was wrong. It couldn't have been the Mac Classic because it was earlier than that. 1980s for sure.
It wasn't the Steve Jobs NeXT cube was it? That's what he did when he left Apple.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTcube
https://www.storiesofapple.net/steve-jobs-next-computer.html
Anonymous
02/23/2026 19:10
Subject: When was first time you heard of someone working from home?
*scripts
Anonymous
02/23/2026 19:10
Subject: When was first time you heard of someone working from home?
In the early 80s one of my friends' dads was always at home. He was a soap opera writer and would watch soaps all day, then type his scipts and they sent a courier to pick them up. I thought it was so fancy that he had headphones that plugged into the TV so he didn't bother anyone else.
Anonymous
02/23/2026 19:06
Subject: When was first time you heard of someone working from home?
USPTO (Patent & Trademark Office)
2008
2008
Anonymous
02/23/2026 19:03
Subject: When was first time you heard of someone working from home?
I think I was one of the first senate staffers to wfh- in 2010
Anonymous
02/23/2026 19:00
Subject: When was first time you heard of someone working from home?
When I started my job in 2000, there were people there who'd been telecommuting on laptops for at least 2-3 years from other states, and this was a company with 20 people. I had a laptop from day one but went to the office daily for 10 years except during snow. Then went hybrid, now fully remote. People have had every combination of schedule you can imagine. They've always been extremely flexible.
Anonymous
02/23/2026 18:50
Subject: When was first time you heard of someone working from home?
Starting teleworking once a week in the mid-1990s. Also, my mom was in “outside sales” and worked out of the house and her car.
Anonymous
02/23/2026 18:23
Subject: When was first time you heard of someone working from home?
1997. A company I worked for started letting salespeople work from home.
But first someone from HR in California needed to fly in and inspect your home to be sure you had a quiet place to work, no obvious hazards or fire safety issues.
But first someone from HR in California needed to fly in and inspect your home to be sure you had a quiet place to work, no obvious hazards or fire safety issues.
Anonymous
02/23/2026 18:11
Subject: When was first time you heard of someone working from home?
Anonymous wrote:I did in 2010 and my friends couldnt believe it. It was so foreign to everyone at that time.
There were remote jobs then, though not common.
One day a week was common in the early 2000s and I negotiated 2-days/week in 2011, then 4 days/week in 2018.