13 photos from the 1950s that show how drastically everyday life has changed

In today's offices, we can't escape the tap tap tap of laptop keyboards, but it was an altogether different kind of tapping back in the 50s thanks to typewriters. Typists were hired to write down everything, but they had to be careful as it was difficult to erase a mistake, meaning you often had to start all over again.

As desktop computers became more popular in the following decades before being replaced by personal laptops, typewriters stopped being used in the office and are now mostly kept in museums.

While today, a computer would take up just a corner in a room, back in the 50s, they were a new piece of technology, and would take up an entire room. They also generated large amounts of heat, meaning they'd be impossible to have in domestic homes or offices.

As such, during the decade, computers were mainly used by the government or the military to tackle complex calculations or processing large amounts of data. It wouldn't be until the 1980s that people started having personal computers in their homes.

Computers weren't the only appliances that were large in the 50s, although television sets were considerably smaller and could at least fit in the corner of a room.

However, they were far from the flat-screen, high-quality devices that we know today, with them only featuring a small screen, and at the beginning of the decade, they were only capable of broadcasting in black-and-white. In fact, despite the size of the appliance, the screen was tiny, often only measuring around 10 to 14 inches, nothing like the 50 inches that many today enjoy.

And while today, we expect the screen to turn on as soon as soon as you hit that on button, back then, you had to wait between one and two minutes for the vacuum tubes to heat up before audio and visuals popped up, and forget just using the remote to turn the channel, you needed to manually tune your TV set for watching.

If you think your washing machine today is loud, imagine the sound these giants could produce! While today, we just load in our dirty clothes and come back when it's finished, back then the process wasn't entirely automatic, and users would need to move clothes between the separate tubs to remove their stains.

These beasts also didn't drain on their own, with the pipe needing to feed through the sink when finished. And some devices were even portable, although we could hardly imagine moving it out from under the kitchen cabinets these days.

Refrigeration hadn't taken off in Britain in the 50s, with only three per cent of households owning one at the start of the decade. This meant that keeping milk for yourself was tricky, and it would likely go off. Thankfully, milkmen were on hand to deliver fresh pints of milk to your doorstep every day.

The 50s was the last decade of their heyday, and as homes throughout the 1960s started purchasing fridges, they were no longer needed.

Another job that you'd see people performing every day in the 50s was a filling station attendant. Whether you needed more petrol for the car or the windshield being scrubbed, they were on hand every time you pulled into a petrol station.

These days, consumers are more likely to carry out these jobs themselves, with self-service pumps and air available at every petrol station across the country.

Today, we might just throw on a hoodie and a pair of pyjama pants to head down to our local store, but back in the 50s, doing the food shop was seen as a social activity, so people made sure to dress their nicest.

Chances are on the shop, you'd end up speaking with your neighbours or friends, so of course you'd want to look your best instead of showing up in a scruffy pair of clothes. Nowadays, the food shop is just a part of daily life and no one is throwing on a suit and tie to buy a tin of baked beans.

Another time people dressed nicely during the 1950s was when they needed to catch a flight. Flying was one of the ultimate luxuries of the decade, so of course you needed to look nice for such a monumental occasion. Given that it was reserved for the heights of society, you didn't want to look a mess if you found yourself on the same flight as Marilyn Monroe.

However, as flying became more accessible, rules on clothes loosened, and nowadays, it's not uncommon to see a passenger in just a pair of shorts and a T-shirt as they jet off for a quick holiday in the sun.

To make flying feel even more special during the decade, airports were also catered to the elite of society. So while today if you desire a really fancy meal, you might look inside a five-star hotel, back then, you'd end up heading to the airport.

You could expect to dine on the likes of lobster thermidor, roast beef, oysters and even Welsh rarebit if you were on the go. Today, convenience has trumped this, so food is designed to be something you can quickly grab while you wait for your gate.

Arriving in the 1920s thanks to Woolworths (remember them?), lunch counters were a quick place to grab food for decades. The food wasn't anything special, think soups and club sandwiches, but if you needed a quick bite, they were the perfect place to head.

As fast food restaurants started exploding in popularity in the 1960s, people stopped going to the lunch counters, leading to their eventual phase-out.

While the strains of the NHS mean sometimes people are treated in corridors, at least when we finally get admitted to hospital, there will be a limited number of people in the room with us. Back in the 50s, wards would be lined with dozens of hospital beds with people of varying states of illness all around. As medical practices advanced, the number of people on wards started decreasing.

While today, you're likely to see someone with a suave pair of sunglasses to protect their eyes while out and about, back in the 50s, these nifty little plastic items were the go-to item. They weren't the most comfortable items, but they still have a small niche in tanning salons.