Agree that very few people use fax machines but that doesn’t mean that they have gone away. I work in healthcare I.T. and during the October 2025 AWS outage, many US healthcare EMRs were offline (still usable in the clinic or hospital but not able to connect to outside sources). In the US almost all e-prescribing goes through a company called Surescripts that routes the electronic messages back and forth from healthcare organizations to pharmacies. They maintain a database of US pharmacies that include their fax numbers, and healthcare organizations download that database into their EMRs. During the outage, providers would create prescriptions in their EMRs and those EMRs would try to send them electronically, fail, then failover to fax. This happened seamlessly for most healthcare organizations without end users even knowing they were faxing prescriptions to pharmacies rather than sending them “electronically”. Of course as more and more fax services become cloud based, a major internet outage will stop faxing as well. Just an interesting tidbit of one industry that has automatic failover to a really old technology. 
Electric typewriters!
I used my dad’s old manual typewriter from grade school through my undergraduate days. In graduate school I used an electric typewriter. In the 1990s, to write something, I first had to learn DOS commands, and it just cyberized up from there. Nowadays I would not even know where to find a typewriter.
mimeograph machines in every business/church/political campaign in the 50’s
I know someone who typed his doctoral dissertation on an electric typewriter (do not ask me why; it is not like computer terminals were hard to find in universities at the time period in question). So he had the manuscript in his backpack. Then his backpack got stolen…
Some people kept those sweet IBM Selectrics, and I am sure you could buy one for $1,500 or so.
Hmm, $1,700 and up, depending on condition.
I actually wanted to hoard some typewriters and teletypes at the time people were just throwing them out, but did not have the space to store them…
I bet a lot of school systems have tons of those suckers tucked away in a warehouse.
The vast majority of them with blank keys (cays? quays?)!
This thread is looking for things that were not there when you were a child, but became ubiquitous and then went away.
My mother is 91 so this was be true for her, but not me as I was born in the early 60s.
In Japan, standalone word processors became quite popular from the 80s and into the 90s. The word processers (waa puro in Japanesee) solved the problem of how to handle kanji.
Japanese manual typewriters had from hundreds to a couple thousand kanji, as well as hiragana and katakana, the syllabaries.
Most people didn’t learn to type and never actually used a typewriter. Once the word processors became popular, they allowed ordinary people to type for the first time.
Then PCs and Macs killed the market.
ISWYDT!
well, since I was born in the 40’s, to me they became ubiquitous at that time, unless you know exactly when they became popular
What I think of when I think of a “mimeograph machine” is, I think, technically a “spirit duplicator” (a.k.a. “ditto machine”). Those were invented in 1923, and as far as I can tell, were probably already widespread by the time you were born.
Doesn’t “spirit duplicator” sound like a machine for cloning ghosts?
There’s a story i that, I think.
Tell him about the Twinkie.
Just out of curiosity, how did that process compare to your navy nuclear qualifications (e.g. nuke school + prototype + qualification in the fleet)
I ask this because that is my calibration point for “crazy busy studying and hard work” that beat university by a country mile. It made standard college courses trivial in comparison.
2001 and several other titles were “presented in Cinerama” but filmed in SuperPanavision 70, not the original three-strip “true” Cinerama. The three-strip process was so expensive and cumbersome that it was soon replaced by single-strip 70mm formats. But since the Cinerama brand had become famous, the company stuck the name onto these newer formats. Cite.
I’ve seen at least three or four of the three-strip films (This is Cinerama, Windjammer, How the West Was Won, and maybe one or two others) on several occasions at the New Neon Theater in Dayton, OH, and at the Pictureville Cinema in Bradford, UK. The experience was impressive, but inherently flawed by the seams between the images, which were a constant distraction. The single-strip formats were much better.
ETA: A interesting detail I just remembered: the three-strip process was filmed and projected at 26 fps, instead of the standard 24, I think as a way to prevent later unauthorized repurposing of the footage. Each strip also used a non-standard 6-perf-tall frame, instead of 4-perf, to increase the overall frame size, and hence overall resolution.
Picking film format nits again. Those two were the only ones shot in 30 fps Todd-AO. About 16 others were shot at the standard 24 fps rate, because shooting at 30 meant you had to either reshoot or simul-shoot at 24 for the standard wide release. Cite.
I saw Oklahoma! in 30 fps Todd-AO at the Motion Picture Academy back in the 1990s. It was magnificent.
Here I go again. This is a common misunderstanding. Mimeograph used a stencil, created with a typewriter or a photo process, through which ink was passed onto the paper as it ran through the press.
In ditto, the stencil itself, created with a typewriter or pen, held the ink. As the paper passed through the machine, it was sprayed with alcohol, which dissolved a little of the ink onto the sheet. The number of copies you could make with a ditto was much more limited than a mimeograph.
But ditto had that distinctive smell everyone remembers and loves. (Mimeo just smelled like ink.)
Both kinds of machine were common in schools and offices in the 1950s through 70s, and many people didn’t understand the technical differences, so the two terms were often used interchangeably.
When I did my dissertation, in 1980, typewritten dissertations were common. Being a computer science major I did mine on Multics. There were a lot of people who made money by typing dissertations.
Back then there were no laser printers easily available, or available at all, so it was hard to do anything complicated. A new professor in my department whose dissertation was highly mathematical had to run the entire thing through the IBM Selectric terminals twice to get superscipts and subscripts. I designed mine so it could be done using what was available on our line printers.
Yeah, I remember there were a LOT of ads in the school newspapers for typing services, placed mostly by students who could type really well and really fast looking for a way to make some coin on their own schedule. IIRC, the going rate was about a buck per page, with discounts for more pages. Hell, do universities even have newspapers now??
We didn’t use either name in my school. We called it a Gestetner, its prominently displayed brand name.