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In 1971, planes carrying millions of financial and administrative records—order forms, charge slips, telephone system files, oil well logs—began arriving at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor airport. These paper records were then driven twenty-five minutes south to the Gila River Indian Reservation, home to the Pima and Maricopa nations, where, in the cafeteria of the reservation’s arts and craft center, dozens of employees, mostly Indigenous women, retyped them into computer-readable form. Few remember it anymore, but that cafeteria was the front line of the digital revolution.
In the 1960s, computers were sweeping corporate America, promising more efficient processing of insurance claims and retail sales, but the transition presented a massive logistical problem: Most companies still conducted their business on paper. If they wanted these expensive new devices to save time and cut costs, companies first needed to digitize everything: invoices, receipts, ticket sales, job applications, credit reports, letters, phone messages, and handwritten notes. The scale of paper records was staggering. The credit bureau TransUnion, for instance, needed to transpose fourteen million credit records into computer-readable form. At the federal level, the U.S. Treasury had to digitize four hundred million records per year. All that work would require human labor—a lot of it.
