Saturday, August 29, 2020

I Remember When

 I built a house for a guy once (I have about a 1,000 of these stories) who was retired from a long career selling the forms that ran in these order machines.  In the early years they had carbon paper between the pages of the form, in later years a carbonless duplicating paper was used.  I left the building business in 1995, and he had retired because he was old enough and the business was going away, the company he worked for was dropping the line and moving on.  

I remember working with carbon paper, before every office had a copy machine, we used carbon paper to produce copies of contracts to build homes.  It was fussy stuff, but with a little care, and a hard press it did the job.  For simple change orders we used carbonless (NCR) forms.  

I remember buying my first copy machine in 1988.  I was working a project near the University of Central Florida.  One of my customers brought in his brother to buy a house one morning.  The brother sold copy machines for a living.  We talked, be bought a house, I bought a copy machine.  It was around $1,000, and does less than the $150 HP that I have at home today.  Within a couple of days, I had someone in, who was looking at a new design, that we didn't have flyers on.  I copied the floor plan from the blueprints, she showed them to her husband that evening, and came back the next morning to buy.  Having the machine, resulted in an extra sale that I might have otherwise missed.  That $1,000 machine, made me a lot of money.  A year or so later, the company caught on, and started buying machines for every office.  

I was surprised to see this in use, in a hardware store in a small town in northern Ohio this month.  I wonder if someone is still printing the forms, or if they stocked up on a lifetime supply.  

16 comments:

  1. Anonymous8/29/2020

    I love remembering the old low tech.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. A neat little shop. in the same location and business since the 1850's

      Delete
  2. carbon paper, mimeograph machines were the shit in the 60s-early 70s. by the end of the 70s, xerox copiers everywhere. and remember how huge those suckers were? just like early computers.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. In many ways life has become easier.

      Delete
  3. I remember typing with carbon paper in order to make copies of letters. It was one long pain in the ass.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I remember getting it in upside down once.

      Delete
  4. Amazing that's still being used. We were just recently telling a 20-something friend of ours about typing multiple copies using carbon paper... and a typewriter... (and how convoluted it was to make a correction). She was stunned.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. We no longer have a typewriter

      Delete
    2. This comment has been removed by the author.

      Delete
    3. I'll try this again:
      In a manner of speaking ... yes you do! You currently are using a "keyboard" to type out what you say in here ... you type ... you write ... LOL Nowadays, you just don't have to roll a sheet of paper into the machine ... now you just send the words to the printer where the paper is loaded!

      Delete
    4. I remember typing on a manual typewriter

      Delete
  5. I remember it all--ditto machines, carbon paper, manual typewriters, etc. I still have my dad's old typewriter he used to type his PhD dissertation on back in the late 1940s.

    What is the weirdest thing to me is calculators. Back in 1972 I went to an office supply store and bought my first calculator. It was a Texas Instrument solar model. It did four functions-add, subtract, multiply and divide. Not even percentages, and it cost over seventy dollars!! I used it to add my grades in my grade book at report card time. Of course, I had to then do the averages on my own. Now even basic calculators are under ten dollars and almost seem like a scientific machine compare to the originals.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I remember the first one my parents bought, and the mechanical adding machine it replaced

      Delete
  6. I don't think I've ever seen one like in your photo before but I've seen some that look similar. Carbon paper really was a pain to use but it did the job!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The ones I remember were aluminum or stainless steel, and more compact.

      Delete
  7. I recall carbon paper and electric typewriters and white out.

    ReplyDelete