The Rise of Remote Work: A Much Older Story Than You’d Think

Ask most people when remote work started, and the honest answer they’d give is “2020.” It’s an understandable guess – that’s when it became impossible to ignore. But the rise of remote work isn’t really a pandemic story at all. It’s a story that stretches back centuries, sped up gradually across decades of specific technological shifts, and then got compressed into a single dramatic year that made something already well underway suddenly visible to everyone at once.

Understanding that longer arc actually explains a lot about why remote work has stuck around rather than reverting once the emergency passed. It wasn’t an aberration forced onto a system built for something else – it was the continuation of a trend that had been building, quietly, for a very long time.

Before There Was an Office at All

Here’s a genuinely useful reframing: working from home isn’t the new arrangement in human history – it’s closer to the original one, briefly interrupted. For centuries before anyone talked about “remote work” as a concept, people simply worked where they lived. Skilled blacksmiths, carpenters, leather workers, and potters each set up shop at their own residence and sold their goods directly from there, with no separate commute, no distinct office building, no real distinction between “home” and “workplace” at all.

This wasn’t a fringe arrangement – it was simply how most skilled work operated for a very long stretch of history. The idea of large groups of workers gathering in one centralized location specifically to complete work together, for reasons other than war or emergency response, genuinely didn’t take hold until much later.

The Industrial Revolution Invented the Commute

If you’re looking for a single era to credit – or blame – for the traditional 9-to-5, in-office model most of us grew up assuming was simply “how work works,” the Industrial Revolution is the actual answer. Large-scale machinery needed to be housed and maintained in dedicated facilities, and factory production required workers to be physically present to operate it. This is genuinely when people started commuting to designated workspaces for the first time in any widespread, structural way – a fundamental shift from the home-based labor that had defined most work up to that point.

Society underwent a real paradigm shift here, moving from a world of individually scattered workers, each plying their trade from their own residence, toward something considerably closer to the shared, centralized “rat race” that became the unquestioned default for the following century and a half. It’s worth sitting with how recent that shift actually is in the scope of human history – the in-office model many people assume is timeless is, comparatively, a fairly modern invention.

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1973: The Year “Telecommuting” Actually Got Named

This is the piece of the history of remote work that most casual retellings skip entirely, and it’s genuinely the right starting point for the modern version of this story. The term “telecommuting” was coined in 1973 by Jack Nilles, a NASA engineer, in his work “The Telecommunications-Transportation Tradeoff.” Jack Nilles telecommuting wasn’t a response to a desire for lifestyle flexibility – it emerged specifically during the U.S. oil crisis, as a proposed solution to genuinely practical problems: minimizing time spent commuting and reducing energy consumption at a moment when fuel scarcity was a real, pressing national concern.

This origin point matters because it reframes remote work’s founding motivation entirely. It wasn’t invented as a perk or a cultural preference – it was engineered as a practical response to traffic congestion, long commutes clogging urban centers, and a genuine energy crisis. The idea that employees could complete meaningful work without being physically present at a company’s premises was, at the time, a fairly radical structural proposal, not the widely accepted norm it would eventually become decades later.

The 1970s Through the 1990s: Technology Slowly Makes the Case

Following Nilles’ initial framing, the practical infrastructure for remote work built up gradually, piece by piece, over the following two decades. The first personal computer arrived in 1975, giving workers a genuine reason to imagine work happening somewhere other than a shared office terminal. Companies began experimenting cautiously – a notable early example: what started as a team of five remote workers at one organization grew to 2,000 by 1983, with call center staff, who already conducted all their work via phone anyway, given the option to do so from home rather than a centralized facility.

The 1990s brought the piece that actually made remote work practically viable at any real scale: the internet and the World Wide Web. The federal government itself ran a formal telecommuting study on 2,000 federal workers in 1990, and the results were notable enough to matter – those workers proved measurably more productive, reported better quality of life and work-life balance, and cut both personal expenses and commuting time considerably compared to their in-office counterparts. By 1994 and 1995, recognizable major companies – American Express, IBM, and AT&T among them – had begun formally allowing employees to telecommute, marking one of the first real waves of mainstream corporate adoption rather than isolated experimentation.

The 2000s: From Curiosity to Genuine Infrastructure

The 2000s marked the shift from remote work as an interesting experiment to remote work as something increasingly supported by real, widespread infrastructure. Broadband internet and Wi-Fi became considerably more accessible, laptops started genuinely replacing desktop computers as the default professional device, and collaboration tools began emerging that made distributed teamwork meaningfully more functional than email alone had allowed in the previous decade.

This period also saw the rise of “garage startups” and a new class of entrepreneur – 1999’s arrival of the first commercial websites had already begun reshaping what a “workplace” could even mean, and the following decade built the practical tools that turned that possibility into something genuinely operable at scale, not just a novelty for the technically inclined.

The Pandemic Didn’t Start This Story – It Accelerated an Ending Already in Motion

This is the part worth being precise about, because it’s the most commonly misunderstood piece of the rise of remote work as a narrative. COVID-19 didn’t invent remote work. It took an already decades-long trend and compressed years of gradual, cautious corporate adoption into a matter of weeks, forcing companies that had resisted the shift for years to prove – almost overnight, and against their own stated skepticism – that distributed work could genuinely function at scale.

The results of that involuntary, large-scale experiment are exactly why remote work didn’t simply revert once the acute emergency passed. Telecommuting had already seen a 115% boom in the decade before the pandemic even hit, and post-pandemic surveys found a substantial majority of businesses planning to keep some form of remote arrangement as part of their permanent operating model, not a temporary accommodation to be quietly phased out once conditions normalized.

What This Longer History Actually Tells Us

Pulling this arc together reveals something genuinely useful for understanding where things stand today: remote work isn’t a temporary disruption to an otherwise permanent, timeless office-based norm. It’s closer to a return, technologically enabled, to a working pattern that predates the centralized office by a considerable margin – with the Industrial Revolution representing the actual historical exception, not remote work itself.

This reframing matters practically, not just as trivia. Companies and workers treating today’s remote and hybrid arrangements as a fragile, temporary pandemic-era accommodation are working from an inaccurate premise. The remote work timeline shows a consistent, decades-long trajectory toward more distributed work, interrupted briefly by roughly 150 years of industrial-era centralization, then accelerated dramatically – but not originated – by a single forcing event in 2020. Understanding that longer arc helps explain why so many workers, once they’d genuinely experienced a distributed working arrangement at scale, simply weren’t willing to give up the tangible benefits – reduced commuting, greater autonomy, measurably better work-life balance – that Nilles’ original 1970s telecommuting concept had predicted decades before most people ever tried it themselves.

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The Bottom Line

The rise of remote work is a genuinely longer, richer story than the popular “started in 2020” narrative suggests – one that runs from pre-industrial home-based labor, through the Industrial Revolution’s invention of the commute, through Jack Nilles’ 1973 oil-crisis-driven telecommuting proposal, through decades of gradual technological buildup, and finally into a pandemic that didn’t create this shift so much as it forced the rest of the world to catch up to a trend that had already been building, quietly and steadily, for half a century.

Knowing that history doesn’t just satisfy curiosity – it explains why remote work has proven durable rather than a passing disruption, and why betting against its continued relevance means betting against a trajectory that’s been building for considerably longer than most people realize.