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> We must reserve a back room [une arriereboutique] all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude

And thus the man-cave was born :)

My dream house would have a big study with books covering the walls floor to ceiling and a big wooden desk in the middle, like the one in Palazzo Revoltella in Trieste[0][1] (by the way, goo see the Museo Rivoltella if you ever go to Trieste).

The current small room I work from is something already. At least I can close the door when I call customers and team-mates. Heaps better than when I had to work from the living room. But a bit more room (and not having to share the space with the pantry) would be nice.

[0] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/33/47/20/3347206a9602a062ee8f...

[1] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/04/99/fb/0499fb98b756a2511c40...

> At least I can close the door

Just as a reminder for the youth: in the ancient times, doors used to be de rigueur for professional software folk.

(I don't know which of you all messed that up, but whoever they are ought to be ashamed of themselves)

When we moved office from one with actual rooms with max 4 people in it to an open space I cried a little internally. Our boss proceeded to extol the virtues of an open space for exchange of ideas and collaboration. Guess who was a stable occupant of one of the conference rooms after less than one month and stopped coming to the office altogether after a while.

Working from home now is bliss. If I'll ever start working in a shared workspace again I want an actual office.

I remember seeing a guy selling his book about practical software engineering and project management at a trade show some 25 years ago. One of his claims was that he had a statistic that showed that a closeable door and muteable telephone resulted in 10x productivity for programmers / sw-engs.

Add a copy of Library Genesis in a rack in a closet.

This. And a garden, and a microscope, and an electronics lab, and a mechanical workshop.

When I was in undergrad, I worked with Barry Wellman (one of the early proponents of Social Network Analysis). One of his research projects back in the 1970s-90s was interviewing people about their home offices, and they'd have them take photos of their desk, computer setup, etc. Really cool stuff to see how people decide to focus. I wonder how much it's changed?

This is a nice article going in the other chronological direction!

Did many people have home offices in that period?

This is a really interesting question because I think the definition of a home office has changed quite a bit.

In North America, there was a period in the 80s and 90s where the Desktop PC was very much a shared device. You'd have it sitting somewhere like the living room or basement, maybe near the TV, you'd have a landline phone next to it, etc.

I think a lot of families had those, but it's very different from the idea of a "home office" where you have a separate/isolated work room.

Anecdotally, my grandfather had a more extensive home office than I do. He never took work home with him from the company office, which he exclusively worked from. This would’ve been the 80’s when he was employed as an engineer manager in aerospace

The Official Preppy Handbook (tongue in cheek, of course, but its observations are often basically accurate) describe a dedicated office as a fixture of (what Fussell would classify as) upper-middle-class homes. Nb that class has historically had more flexibility on working from home than the rest of us, and generally been accustomed to looser restrictions and more freedom to set their own agendas (this has shifted with the intrusion of MBA- and finance-types into the strongholds of this class, like universities and hospitals, but that’s another topic) That account was published in 1980.

My background is a mix of Fussellian mid- and upper-prole and regular ol’ middle, and an office space, if only a roll top desk tucked in a corner, but a room if space allowed, has always been a feature of my parents’ homes.

Pre-computer, that’s where paperwork and mail and other records that needed to be stored and worked with too long to live on the kitchen table (see: home space use studies, which spawned the misguided trend of building desks into kitchens in American houses) went. When desktop computers became a thing, that’s where the family computer went. (Yes, kids, even when we got the Internet at home, it was still located in a physical place you had to go and remain to keep using it—what a change smartphones have been!)

This version of the home office as a hub for personal document and important-paper-stuff management is basically dying, which is why it may seem surprising they ever existed. I don’t even need a laptop for most of this stuff, let alone an office—nearly everything important happens on my phone, and that’s becoming more normal. I don’t even need a kitchen table for it.

I actually have a home office with built in desks, file cabinets, and bookshelves mostly for computer-related books.

But my dining room/kitchen is lighter and airier. If I’m not shuffling a lot of paper, using dual monitors, or doing the rare video call, I mostly use a laptop downstairs.

I do prefer to use a laptop over a phone for most things though.

Perhaps more common than now, even with the resurgence from remote working, I'd say.

My study is modest: just a spare bedroom that serves as a home office, sanctuary, and musical practice room... and with a few cheap bookshelves to turn it into a "library" as well.

Still, I have not always had the means nor the space for such a luxury, and it's one of those things that I never take for granted.

This describes my study perfectly. It truly is a sanctuary. For the most part I avoid using it for work, so that it can serve as a complete escape from that part of my life.

I am thinking of making this transition as well.

As I age I realize how much of life's moods are intertwined with physical places and their emotional associations based on what I do in that place every day.

Whats going on with all the drawn-in stuff on the photo of WEB Dubois?

Very much worth reading. Excellent. I didn't know publicdomainreview before either.

As someone who has always been a collector, I found this particular article very interesting:

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/redressing-the-balance-...

A man's desk/workbench or an equivalent is a glimpse into his thoughts; everything exists and is where it is for a reason.

Any time I look inside my SSDs and HDDs I am satisfactorily horrified.

> If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign? -- Einstein (but probably not really)

The unbearable value of potential. Similar to a blank notebook or whiteboard. Or good land eviscerated for lawn.

The other day, after cleaning my own desk (~4 months of accrued detritus), I thought it would be good to invent a desk filing system where the benchtop can be moved out of the way and a different workspace can be deployed, similar to virtual desktops. A sort of 'physivirtual' desktop. I might just try that at home. My sketchy idea was a vertical cable-driven elevation, followed by a horizontal filing in to ceiling and wall-suspended racks for storing the array of out of use desktops. Electronics in particular is frustratingly object-laden, and any dense workspace array of test equipment tediously immobile. The biggest problem would be vertical space: in a typical room only 3m is available and 2 of that is taken for standing, leading to a maximum benchtop count of 2-3 which is insufficiently attractive to justify the investment.

Another potential alternative would be some sort of book wheel. Where the book surface is wide enough to accommodate the desk's surface. Each surface could then have its own layout to suit its unique purpose.

I share your frustration with electronics. I'd love to be able to simply shove it all back into the wall once I'm done. Power supply, soldering iron, components and all.

No desk is truly empty, as each desk contains lots of spacetime, as well as particle-antiparticle pairs which exist only briefly.

Tons of Zero Point Energy to weight on when using such desk

My thoughts are a jumble of everything I’ve thought about and messed around with in the past 3 months or so?

Are you me?

My study is the library. My favorite place.