I set up my own household in 1992 (an apartment) and since then I have never had a typewriter not had occasion to use one. Secretaries in our office used to have them from 1992 to maybe 1996 when there were still a few forms that needed to be typed in (I remember internal HR training paperwork for job changes).
But I don’t think I have seen a typewriter in the wild in almost 30 years. I’ve seen them in collectors shops and the window of a typewriter repair shop that was somehow in business in 2004-2006 near my office at the time.
My daughter knows what a typewriter is and how it works from studying the origin of the QWERTY keyboard and the lore surrounding it during middle school (she’s now at University)
Any Brazilian older than a certain age would recognize a public telephone token: a ficha.
The Brazilian public telephone system used a token that looked like a zinc slug with three grooves going across–one across the equator on one side, and a groove each across the “upper latitudes” and “lower latitudes” on the flip side. The result was a coin that could fit in a keyhole-shaped coin slot.
Here’s a photo (probably not a very durable link):
These were available at bodegas and from street vendors in any Brazilian town.
At some point the telephones all changed over to a phone card system, and then they all evaporated with the advent of the ubiquitous cellular phone.
Those telephone tokens remind me of shower tokens you needed on many European camping sites to take a shower, they looked almost the same. You had to buy them for a small fee, 1 mark in Germany or 1000 lire in Italy for instance, at the reception. I haven’t been on camping holidays for 15 years, so I don’t know if they still exist.
That reminds me of something from my childhood. In primary school (1st through 4th grade) papers were printed on something that I distinctly remember was called a risograph. It was a small machine (compared to giant photocopiers from the future) that I saw in use in the school office. It used a master stencil and printed on blue on thin, shiny paper that had a distinctive smell. I absolutely know that they called it a risograph, but I see those were invented in 1980 in Japan, which means my school would have had to have one in the first year of production, which definitely seems unlikely. So I suppose someone there must have heard that term and mistakenly called the printer/printouts that? So I’m not sure what technology it was. It sounds like a spirit duplicator but it wasn’t a hand-cranked desktop device.
The ‘two part’ carbonless duplication paper is a little easier to find in delivery and service call slips like the plumber, oil change, or appliance delivery person might bring but especially in restaurants. Short order kitchens, catering, stapled to the bag or pizza box, a yellow copy for the customer. But actual pressure transfer purple/black paper like the old credit card kerchunkers, gone.
Anyone here remember thermal printers - i.e. a device that required special heat-sensitive paper to print anything? The last one I used wasn’t all that recent, and I’ve never owned one, but they worked by the device applying heat to the paper. A document printed this way would get spoiled if it got exposed to too much other heat.
Not something that many people would recognize, even my age: When I was in high school, my mother worked at an H&R Block doing taxes. Each of us kids did a stint doing admin work in the back - mostly making copies of the returns. The customers would sit with the preparer, who did the return by hand on translucent paper, always in pencil, because ink wasn’t opaque enough.
Then it would be sent to the back, where we “processors” would run those pages through a Bruning Copyflex machine - ours looked like model 435 in that link.
We’d grab a sheet of photosensitive paper, lay the original on top, and feed it in. It would go through the exposure cycle, then the original would (usually) peel off, while the copy would go through rollers with developing solution and come out the top. If we saw the original fail to peel off, we had a lever we could flip to make it separate before going through the solution. Then we’d “assemble” everything: staple the copies into one stack and the originals in another, and the customer would return in a few days to pick it up and mail it off to the IRS.
This was back in the days when mimeographs were still pretty common, and more modern photocopiers were just barely becoming available. I expect that Copyflex didn’t last much longer than my tenure there.
And they are still stored and archived physically by businesses for a possible tax audit, although they probably will be unreadable in a few years when finally the audit comes around…
And they do one job and do it well for a fraction of the cost. I don’t think there will ever be a lab bench without at least a basic four function solar calculator on it.
I don’t know if it was the same process as “azo” mentioned above, but they did also sell that printer for plan printing. And —
You use a proper ink, in a drafting pen, to get opaque lines.
But “penciling in” was a thing accountants and book keepers did anyway, particularly when they were doing “spreadsheets”, but generally any kind of thing where you adjusted the figures as you worked through them, so they probably didn’t want Indian Ink anyway.
Both of which are now obsolete. Sure, you can still use a handheld calculator on any of the major standardized tests, but you can also use Desmos, a really great graphing app, which is now built in to the testing app for all of the major tests. And it also uses physical buttons, the ones on your computer keyboard, plus it also uses the mouse, which together make it far easier to use than any of the standard handheld calculators.
The only reason left for the TI-84 or equivalents (though, let’s be honest, it’s 99% TI-84s) is inertia.
Which “inertia” can also take the form of “No budget for replacements”.
With lots of such stuff, as you know, the hardware is the visible tip of the cost iceberg. The curriculum materials and user training is the mongo underwater part.
Same problem in my old industry. Lots of fully amortized old-days spending buried in the status quo. Which any big change must extensively uproot and replace en masse. Ouch!
