At a business, a secretary, almost always a woman, would answer the phone for all calls. There were no direct lines into anyone. If you were in she would transfer the call to your office. If you were out she would use this pad to take messages. When you came back in to the office you would always stop at the front desk and you would be handed your messages.
At the time that these were in use if you described technology of today they would have considered it science fiction. In the near future I expect all live voice communications or voice messages to be via projected holograms.
I was just clearing out the desk of an employee who started the same year I did, in 1985. I was showing a recent college hire that “cut and paste” came from when we literally did that with scissors and glue to make documents. Really old documents were typed on a typewriter, but even when we had word processors, they didn’t handle graphics, so things like that had to be printed or created by the graphics department, then we’d cut them out and glue them down. Once it was all assembled, we’d send them to get copied and printed. Was funny to find examples of that.
Also found some briefing charts that we did on transparencies so that we could put them on an overhead slide projector in a conference room.