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In a time before fax machines were available, and time was of the essence, this was the service that was used when I was working in London for an accountancy practice.  Draft accounts and urgent documents, such as share listing/contractual documents could be posted or couriered but the fastest and most reliable option was to use the Red Star parcel service.  I remember being despatched to various train stations in London with a bundle of brown envelopes for urgent despatch to our northern client.

Red Star Parcels was a service which used passenger trains for transporting parcels between passenger railway stations throughout the United Kingdom, owned and operated by British Rail. It was introduced experimentally on 1 April 1963 and ran to 2001 I believe. Senders could despatch their consignments to selected stations at which the parcels were collected by the recipient.  The service used scheduled trains, and as such, was one of the fastest methods of transporting a package long distances around the country.

The introduction of the fax machine pretty much killed off our use of this service for draft documents.  The only ongoing use was original documents that needed to be signed and witnessed.

I first came across these when I started working for Price Waterhouse in the early 80's.  They were deployed en-mass and ran either some pretty basic spreadsheet software (Lotus 123) or Word Processing software (Wordperfect).  They were also capable of running PW's proprietory audit software (the name escapes me).  In almost all cases you needed the dual disk drive model, you used one disk to load up and run the software and the other to store the data.   How we managed on 360k, then 512k and then the dizzy heights of a 1.2MB 3.5" disk drive I will never know, but that was all we had at the time.

It was on these that I cut my teeth in the IT sector.  No mouse, no windows. A knowledge of DOS was required, think it was 5.0 but then went onto DOS 6.5 before windows effectively killed it off.   Interesting that most of the DOS command remain in use to this day.

The Compaq Portable was announced in November 1982 and first shipped in March 1983 with a single half-height 5¼" 360 kB diskette drive or extra costs for dual, full-height diskette drives. The 28 lb (13 kg)Compaq Portable folded up into a luggable case the size of a portable sewing machine.

Again, this was the "Go-To" product in the early 80's.  The secretaries at Price Waterhouse were extremely proficient in it's use and, as a young qualified accountant, I was taught to type using this package by PW staff, for whom I am eternally grateful.  It was easy to use, had some really useful features and allowed the user to be in control of the software - MS Word now controls the user.  It died a death when Windows hit the market.  Some history - courtesy of wikipedia as below:

Wordperfect was a word processing application with a long history on multiple personal computer platforms. At the height of its popularity in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was the dominant player in the word processor market, displacing the prior market leader Wordstar.   WordPerfect gained praise for its "look of sparseness" and clean display. It rapidly displaced most other systems, especially after the 4.2 release in 1986, and it became the standard in the DOS market by version 5.1 in 1989.   Its dominant position ended after a failed release for Windows followed by a long delay before introducing an improved version, as MS Word was introduced at the same time with a superior design. MS Word rapidly took over the market, helped by aggressive bundling deals that ultimately produced MS Office, and WordPerfect was no longer the standard by the mid-1990s.   WordPerfect for DOS stood out for its macros, in which sequences of keystrokes, including function codes, were recorded as the user typed them. These macros could then be assigned to any key desired. This enabled any sequence of keystrokes to be recorded, saved, and recalled. Macros could examine system data, make decisions, be chained together, and operate recursively until a defined "stop" condition occurred. This capability provided a powerful way to rearrange data and formatting codes within a document where the same sequence of actions needed to be performed repetitively, e.g., for tabular data.