Re: old school

["Suzette Leeming" <suzette -dot- leeming -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Thanks to all who remembered the name - they were mimeograph and ditto
machines - they were two different (but somewhat similar) technologies and
when you mentioned the smell of ditto copies, I could almost smell it again!


Ah, the technology that has come and gone in such a relatively short time!

Suzette Leeming



On Sun, May 18, 2008 at 11:46 PM, Fred Ridder <docudoc -at- hotmail -dot- com> wrote:

>
> > Mimeograph? That has a drum and makes "dittos" of things, at least that's
> > what I heard the copies called. But I don't know about the hole punching
> > thing.
>
> Mimeograph and ditto were two different technologies.
>
> With ditto every character you typed when making the master deposted
> some pigment from one sheet of the 2-part stencil form onto another sheet.
> Then you put the stencil on a drum that contained a volatile (and probably
> toxic) solvent that dissolved part of the deposited pigment and allowed it
> to be deposited on a specially coated copy stock. The drawbacks of ditto
> systems (aka "spirit duplicators") were that you could only make about
> 30-40 clear copies before the pigment deposited on the stencil would be
> depleted and the copies would become illegible, and the duplicated copies
> were purple. The advantage was that the copies smelled great if the
> teacher had just run them off a few minutes before class.
>
> I don't know exactly what the mimeograph technology was, but it was
> good for more like a few hundred legible copies from each master, and
> the images were reproduced in black and did not have that wonderful
> solvent smell. Not nearly so interesting to elementary school students...
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