Yep, we had all that. This was ~35 years ago. They did get abused, used 8 hours a day. Sometimes you just had to give up on it. I remember trying to get that tiny wire back through the nib.
It depends on the thermal paper. Receipt paper is intended to print fast and is more sensitive. Try it on a self adhesive delivery label like FedEx or Amazon shippers use and even a key scratch might not be enough. But a CAREFUL quick pass of a lighter or candle flame or heat gun will blacken it.
Please don’t use my soldering iron with the new tip!
I’m sure that’s true. I was thinking of usual paper receipts and the flimsy thermal paper in old fax machines.
I asked my daughter and her five roommates on a video call if they had ever seen a typewriter in real life. One of them, who is from India, said she had. The rest have only seen them in media.
Thankfully, no one asked “what’s a typewriter?”
Gosh darn it!
I am getting tired of this more insidious autocorrect that just changes whole words because it feels like it. Radiograph Radiograph Radiograph … Yep. All 3 got changed. Rapidograph.
I just don’t use autocorrect at all for that reason. I go back & fix all my squiggly underlined typos myself. Or add the word to the spellcheck dictionary as appropriate.
Does anyone still use NCR paper?
As noted upthread here, these kinds of forms exist here and there IRL.
I suspect that nowadays a lot more such multipart “NCR” forms exist in the internal processes of long-established businesses than are exposed to the public consumer. But once in awhile I sign one and get one of the copies.
IIRC it was standard back in the day that the customer always got the bottom = least legible copy. Who cares about them?
One of the places that those forms do surprise would be quite familiar to the youngsters. Infraction forms, at schools, use duplicating paper, too.
Remember milkboxes? Those little insulated porch boxes where the milkman would leave glass bottles of fresh milk and pick up the empties? They were once a standard feature on front porches across suburbia. Back then, most folks didn’t have full refrigerators, so milk was delivered daily (or close to it), straight from local dairies. The box kept it cool and safe until someone came home.
By the 1970s, milkboxes had mostly vanished. Supermarkets, better refrigeration, and the decline of home delivery made them obsolete. You can still find a few relics on old porches, silent reminders of a time when the clink of glass bottles and the rattle of a milk truck were part of the morning soundtrack.
