In the 1980s, no self-respecting mover and shaker would be seen dead without a personal organiser — and that meant the Filofax.

Loose-leaf pages were snapped into a smart leather binder the size of a small paperback novel, holding everything from a diary and address book to street directories and sales graphs.

It was a sophisticated notebook, really. But they were carried with a certain pride.

Having one showed that you were busy — after all, only the important needed to carry so much information around with them all the time.

The 1980s marked the apotheosis of so-called "power dressing". ( Getty Images: Tim Brown )

Although it's a style icon of the 1980s, its history stretches back to 1910, when the Lefax company was set up by Canadian J C Parker.

He wanted to replace heavy technical manuals with a handheld ringbinder, in which the important pages were close to hand.

In 1920, a British colonel saw one and suggested that a printer friend should make something similar in Britain.

From here, the Filofax brand was born in 1921 — its name suggested by the company secretary Grace Scurr, who said it was, after all, a file of facts.

And she was clearly devoted to the idea.

When the company offices were razed to the ground by a German bomb in 1940, she managed to save all the company records in her own Filofax, thus validating its importance.

An item du jour for the 'sloane ranger'

The mini-organiser proved popular for military officers, but it wasn't discovered by a wider audience until the early 1980s.

The idea caught on with cash-rich yuppies and "sloane rangers" (fashionable upper-class Brits) — of whom the young Lady Diana Spencer was the patron saint.

Suddenly everyone needed to be organised.

The inserts were fairly standard, but just like the apps on today's smart phones, new varieties emerged, such as timetables, wine lists, world maps, and so on.

The difference was in the binder.

Luxury companies such as Mulberry, Gucci and Louis Vuitton all created their own versions, able to hold a pen and the many credit cards essential for a "greed is good" lifestyle.

Cheaper versions were made by other companies, but the Filofax remained king — in the same way as Apple ruled the smartphone roost in the early 2010s.

Sales plummeted when electronic organisers were released in the 1990s, and the smartphone almost dealt the killer blow thereafter.

Yet the lure of pen and paper remains.

The Filofax is making a comeback, as people yearn for a simpler time, when the written word carried literal weight.

In 2004, a San Francisco writer, Merlin Mann, launched the Hipster PDA, which was a jokey rebuttal to the use of expensive tablets and smartphones.

It was little more than plain cards held together with a robust clip. But as an idea with the right blend of utility and irony, it became a surprising success.