I graduated from college in 1979 and my first stop was a CPA firm with two locations.  It took me awhile before I learned that you really needed to roll up your sleeves at that time or you would continually come home with shirt sleeves black from pencil lead rubbing off while working.  We manually prepared returns with pencils and blank tax forms (along with plenty of erasers) and then the secretary got the fun job of typing them up so they would look pretty.  We then progressed to filling out forms for a company to do data entry of the tax return so we could get a pretty tax returns generated by a computer.  We were lucky because the wife of one of the CPAs in our other office worked for the data processing company and she would put our package on the top of her pile when it arrived.  Making a mistake was a pain since you would then have to correct the data and resubmit the return and wait for it to be mailed back.  Sometime in the mid to late 80s we moved on to the luxury of having our own software so that we could cut out the middle man and see the final product immediately instead of waiting for the mail.  In 1992 I started my own firm and was using a tax product that was subsequently bought out by Intuit.  We had the option of choosing Lacerte or ProSeries at that time and obviously I chose ProSeries.  So the moral of the story is, I still remember a little of what I'm doing when preparing a return as opposed to the new generation of tax preparers that know nothing about the basics of tax, but they know how to plug numbers into a computer. 😉