mimeograph

You can't run it off yourself on the mimeograph machine but just go buy 30 copies and leave them in the classroom.

We used to distribute stuff that was printed at night on fucking mimeograph machines! You had to burn the stencils at the end of a run.

Wow, I said mimeograph entirely as a joke, I didn't think anyone had used them this century.

Yep. I was impressed when our school bought its first electric mimeograph. Until then, they were hand cranked.

But radio is the perfect way to unwind after a long day of operating a mimeograph!

Apparently both the copiers were broken, but there was still an old mimeograph sitting in the corner, she tried it, and it still worked.

Type writer, mimeograph, stencils - if you're just doing text or intend for large distribution. Buy a cheap printer with cash, from a location several hundred kilometers from you.

I remember it was one of the happiest moments of my life when I entered that office, picked the softwares I wanted from a list copied using a "mimeograph". Soon after that, guy that was helping us came back carrying a paper box full of 5 1/4" disks on it.

# of secretaries x # letters / day * average # mimeograph copies of each letter. The potential of the technology to affect the use of its outputs was ignored.

Don't think so, mimeograph stencils are typed or drawn on with a stylus so that pressure pushes aside the wax layer and leaves the underlying thin fabric exposed. Then the stencil goes into the mimeograph to make hundreds or thousands of copies.

So, sure, maybe the NYTimes didn't have to publish you, but you could go buy a mimeograph or a printing press and put out your own newsletter, even if you had to stand on the street corner and hand it out yourself. But now the companies that make printing presses won't sell to you.

But regardless of whether we're discussing the modem or the mimeograph, the story of the young usurping the old with 'modern' technology is a classic.

That is, "generic usage" refers to things like people using "a kleenex" to refer to any facial tissue or "a xerox" to refer to any mimeograph. However, when people say "JavaScript", they always mean the exact same JavaScript: the one Oracle owns.

What if in 1950 every newspaper, every book publisher, every typewriter manufacturer, every mimeograph machine maker refuses to do business with you? Yes, you can still buy pen and paper, and no one is stopping you from putting up a modern 95 Theses on your front door.

Barriers to entry for printing kept getting higher until the mimeograph, and I think the barrier to entry is more relevant than the overall efficiency per copy. In order to get those efficiencies, you needed a factory, essentially, and factories are easy to find and legislate about.

The anecdote about the Xerox photocopier's R&D being justified by adding up the number of secretaries and the number of documents replicated via mimeograph comes to mind. [Sorry, couldn't find link] What we don't ever see are the absurdly optimistic justifications for really bad ideas.

It was said that the original business justification for Xerox counted the number of typists in America and multiplied by the number of mimeograph copies produced from each document. Obviously, the copy machine found many more purposes once introduced into offices -- a much more dynamic effect than most could even imagine.

Also think how we can communicate, being tied to proprietary devices and platform, without pens, paper anymore, without the knowledge to write text with pen&paper, without the knowledge of "past" things like "postal system" and "newspapers" that well, we know but at the same knowledge of today's people know ancient mimeograph and polygraph...