Be Excellent To Each Other

Before photocopiers (lol, yes, that old), and around the 80s/early 90s, primary school letters home and the like were printed very roughly.

Now, I remember actually being put in charge of making one of these newsletters to send home as a pupil letter to the families, about the new school pond.

I definitely wrote it by hand, and it appeared in my handwriting, not typed. I am pretty sure that I was told to write very hard, which seems to suggest that it was done using some kind of carbon paper, which is further suggested by the fact that the print was always a kind of purplish-blue colour, but I may be wrong.

I do actually remember taking the finished letter down and the secretary showing me how she was going to make all of the copies, but the memory is only half there, and how it might have worked is really annoying me.

Any ideas?

photostat?

Malc

or maybe just carbon paper?

Malc

Ah ignore that as you mention that in the post (which I missed first reading for some reason)

Malc

Carbon copier

http://www.worldsstrangest.com/mental-f ... e-history/

hmm, not sure about the photostat. Could be, but the results were always bluey-purple, and looking at the prints on google, they don't look to be the same.

Couldn't have been just carbon paper alone as it would produce many, many copies. I know I said press hard', but not hard enough to go through 100+ sheets P

Gestetner Duplicator. I still have one, not sure if you can still get the stencils.

I pioneered using a dot matrix printer and early DTP software on the C64 to do really pro looking things with it. Normally you'd use a manual typewriter or 'scribe' (or ballpoint pen) pressing hard as you said to cut through the wax on the stencil.

Hmmm, maybe. I'm not sure

Goodness, was my school still stuck in the dark ages or something?

http://www.earlyofficemuseum.com/copy_machines.htm more here

We had what looks like that exact one the lady is using, you had a big wheel you had to turn (our school was built during the industrial revolution)

OK! This might be it.

Wiki:


That could be why I have some memory of 'pressing hard' to make the copy.

Yeah that's it (see my edit too)

OMG, the technology is called "mimeography"

I literally giggled out loud like a fool then. Today my name is on all the things.

It could have been a Hectograph
I used one of these once, you use a strange purple felt tip pen to write with (you had to press quite hard to get enough ink down), and then press it onto a tray of jelly. You then press blank pieces of paper on and get 10 or so copies in faint purple. I vaguely remember it being a cheap red plastic tray with a roller thing that you slide back and forth to press the paper into the jelly, and once you were done you melt the jelly down to reset it.

I don't thunk so, as this made enough copies for a hundred or more and I definitely remember the secretary using a machine of some kind. I'm thinking Kalmar is right.

I'm always right, but thank you Mr Dom, for I was just about to ask about exactly that thing you mentioned, which Mimi's memory triggered a recall of. I'm remembering possibly a later version which had several different colour pens - colour copies! Magical at the time.

We used to have them in primary school. I can still remember the smell!

I know! Don't lick the jelly, right?!

How old are you people.....?

I know, right? My school had a photocopier

We had a rabbit and plastic scissors.

You don't know you're born, you young whippersnappers.

There's a really nice article about them here:
http://weeklyscheiss.blogspot.com/2007/ ... -been.html


The thing was, they could do very low cost, high quality copies.
The only drawback was manually making the stencils, and as I say, as a kid in the late 80s I had cracked that by using my C64 and Star printer to cut the stencils. But by then the techology was already completely obsolete other than in little backwaters like where I was, and everyone was using photocopiers instead, although they were a lot more expensive per page and often produced poor results.

I'm going to see if my machine is still lurking at my parents, and if any of the copies I made on it are in my mum's filing cabinet. Early 8-bit mono pixel art!

Mine had 486es with internet access.

I scratched all my lessons into a wax tablet with a pointy stick.

They had these at school. The paper smelt strongly. They'd run off copies of stuff that we'd colour in. The paper also felt funny.

AKA Banda machines. Much cheaper than photocopying, even as recently as ~10 years ago, I remember my Mum's school buying one for the savings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_duplicator

"My cat's breathe smells like cat food."