OMG you should watch the movie War Games with Matthew Broderick…that’s all we had back then at home.
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Loved the smell of the ditto machines!
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Husband worked for Hayes in Atlanta briefly…guy was a bit off his rocker at the time. Hayes, not my husband 
.
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Reminds me of the “broken cupholder” story with a tower computer. The “cupholder” was a CD drive.
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I don’t remember photocopiers being readily available until I was at least in college - everything we got in school was in purple ink from the ditto machine. You used to go to a store - kinkos anyone? - if you needed photocopies, so they existed but weren’t readily available. I also remember using a telex machine on the regular at my first job, along with my IBM selectric typewriter. We did have one of those newfangled fax machines - it was as big as I was - and only one person in the company knew how to use it. People could also smoke at their desks. This was 1984.
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Yes, but… in terms of cost of the machine in the 1970s, photocopy > mimeograph > spirit duplicator (Ditto). Cost per page in the 1970s was photocopy > spirit duplicator > mimeograph. The costs for photocopy were probably around an order of magnitude more than the cheapest duplication option.
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There was a green master you used for mimeograph machines and a purple carbon the the ditto machine. You had to write carefully because correcting them was very difficult & messy. The mineo machine printed black lettering and the ditto machine purple and got fainter the more copies you made from the master. If you jammed the machine—everyone was upset because they couldn’t print their things.
Still unclogging the machine wasn’t terribly complicated, just a bit messy and you’d get the ink on your hands and it never wanted to come off.
I remember when Casio handheld calculators came out - when I was still in college. The power of arithmetic in your hands! They were pretty expensive for the time but very exciting.
And for those kiddies who think of faxes as outdated - when I started working for the government, they were using telecopiers. The papers would be transmitted via phone line but print out on a continuous roll of thermal paper - veeeerrrrryyyy ssslllloooooowwwllllyyy. You would check every half hour or so to see if your document was done.
The same was true of the first personal computers in my office - you would start it up and go down to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee. Back to desk and still booting. Go make some phone calls, come back, still booting. Go to a meeting…
And we had to build macros by hand symbol by symbol! And hope it worked.
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And we learned how slide rules worked–didn’t do much with them, but thought they were pretty interesting. I don’t think my kids have ever seen slide rules! When I was taking a statistics course for sociology, one of the people in my class had no idea that there was ANY connection between fractions and decimals. By the end of the class, I had taught her enough to have a much better understanding and she was able to ace the class.
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I think H and I are younger than most of you (mid 50s), but except for the coupler we had and used most of the things here. Well not punch cards. My parents talked about using those.
My first computer at home was an Apple II plus around 1980? I was in 2nd grade and it cost $3000 for 64K of memory. Not only no mouse, no F keys. It had no arrow keys. I used Apple Writer as my word processor and in order to move the cursor, you had to hit escape twice and use the letters I j k m to get around. My parents talked about Tandy all the time. We may have had those too later.
H and I both loved the ditto machine!
Rotary phones? My kids even know those. My MIL had one into the mid 2000s. And all our phone numbers here have lots of 7s and 9s.
Chalk boards? Older S had them when he took math at our local uni in the 2010s. That prof was nearing retirement and wouldn’t let them switch.
Slide rules? I have my dad’s that he used working for Grumman in the 60s on the lunar module, but H was required to use it in community college in the late 80s! No wonder he hates math lol.
I was still learning FORTRAN in college in the 90s as well as using all the hand drawing tools.
My weird one to add was the blue line machine at work. We had them at the consultant companies I worked for, but the one had to be from tbe 50s. This thing was HUGE! It filled up half a room and had these gigantic jugs of chemicals. We sold it in the 2000s on the government version of eBay. The guy who bought it and came and wanted us to get it out of the building for him. Our guys told him sorry that’s on you! Eventually they figured it out.
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The College Board still uses fax:
Print all fields below except “Signature” and mail the completed form
to AP Services, P.O. Box 6671, Princeton, NJ 08541-6671 or fax it to
610-290-8979.
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I learned Basic and COBOL in college in mid 1970s, on punch cards. Gave up after 2nd computer class. My H had to take out a loan to buy a Digital Equipment computer & dot matrix printer for home use. They took up a lot of space. They lasted a long time!
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I worked out in the forest and we didn’t have cell phones, but we had these:
We used an engineer’s scale on our maps and aerial photos to measure the distances we needed to travel. We traveled in chain units (66 feet - 80 chains to a mile and 10 x 10 chains was exactly 1 acre). We didn’t use a physical measuring tape, we paced distances. My chain pace was 14.5 - it was a double step method and you counted in your head “and one and two and three… as you walked. You adjusted the number based on the terrain and how your pace length differed. For example, uphill, your steps get smaller, so your number of double step paces might increase by 3 or 4.
Now field folks bring phones and IPads out to the field and an app maps you as you travel. Wimpy losers.
Those stereoscopes were cool. You could take two photos taken consecutively by an airplane and line them up in a certain way and with the stereoscope, you could see the vegetation and terrain in 3D. Some people could do it without stereoscopes. I could sort of - I had to cross my eyes to do it and the terrain was reversed with mountains looking like canyons and canyons looking like mountains 
. We used them mainly to map out different vegetation types.
Oh! And a compass doesn’t really point to true north. It points to an ever shifting (slowly) magnetic field in Canada (magnetic north) and there’s a little screw on a compass where you can adjust for the declination where you are. Every USGS topographic map had a little scale that indicated the degrees of declination for that particular map.
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I actually had a purple shirt that I wore when I had to use the ditto machine…because I had purple all over me no matter how much I tried not to.
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They were very costly…and using them to make copies was very costly…until really the 1990’s when xerox and equivalent machines were everywhere.
It was a BIG upgrade in our school when they switched from blackboards to green chalkboards. The green ones used yellow chalk and there was some (probably BS) reason given that the yellow was safer.
@jym626 the thing you posted above that music teachers used to make staff lines…it was also used by classroom teachers to make lines on the chalkboard to teach handwriting (another retro thing). They just took out a few pieces of chalk so they were only making three lines.
I still have a brass protractor my 9th grade math teacher gave me as a gift. For sentimental reasons. He was an awesome teacher!
And we have several slide rules in this house collection (engineer husband).
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I was fascinated by that chalkboard line-drawing tool. It was part of the reason I wanted to be a nun – so I could write on the chalkboard. I thought the two were related.
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So do a lot of medical offices - no portal, got to use a fax to send medical info.
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