I learned to type on a manual type writer, and I don’t know what ‘bcc’ used to stand for; I never heard of it before emails.
(… and I really don’t approve of it …)
Blind carbon copy - when you were sending a copy of the correspondence to someone but you didn’t want the other recipients to know you were doing it.
But I never saw the use before emails.
‘cc’ indicated everyone who got a carbon copy of a letter; typing a ‘bcc’ at the bottom of a letter would be contradictory, as that wouldn’t be ‘blind’.
Better than getting shot at, I imagine. Or at least that’s how I’d feel.
OTOH, I remember the cowardly translator guy in Saving Private Ryan trying to lug his own typewriter to his new assignment, only to be stopped by Tom Hanks holding up a pencil.
Now I have this picture of a bunch of female '50’s secretarial types laboriously shredding documents by hand–rip, rip, rip, rip, rip…
One of the VPs at my company has been working there for many many years. They used to use special memo forms with two sets of carbon - you’d scribble a memo, peel a layer for your file, send it to the recipient, who’d write a response, peel a layer for their file and send it back. There were also any number of self-copying forms for various purposes. His first few years were spent sat in a cube next to a huge noisy machine which automatically separated the various layers of copies and removed the carbon paper, and which was in use all day, every day, much to his chagrin.
In one of my first jobs as a temp office worker, in the early 90s, there was no shredder and a bunch of confidential documents which needed to be destroyed. Working in a downtown skyscraper, there was no way to take these materials and burn them. So there I was with about 450 pages of documents, three pairs of scissors (for when they inevitably dulled) and an oversized trash can. It took me Wednesday, Thursday and Friday to get through it all, and two more pairs of scissors. :eek: My hands ached all weekend, then on Monday I was a moment from walking out the door to head in to work when my temp agency called and said “they decided that they didn’t need you any further.”
As for typing, it was mandatory for all freshpeople (as the school called us) in my all girls Catholic school in 1985. We all learned on manuals, it was a tedious class for me, as I was coming from a secular private school that had introduced me to computers in kindergarten and by that time I had owned a home computer (Apple IIc) for close to three years. Typing on a manual was a whole different ballgame and while I had speed, I didn’t have great accuracy at first, and the teacher disliked my inferior “electronic keyboarding habits.” I pointed out to her that even in 1985, a manual typewriter was a relic of a dead age, and at the very least we should be learning on electric models, if the idea was some sort of vocational ability. At the parent-teacher conference, she told my mother that I was “arrogant.”
My senior year of high school, different school, I ended up with a hole in my schedule that had to be filled. I had all the academic classes available to me plus a workstudy period (you could only have one), and there was no scheduled study hall for the period I had open so I was told “you have to take typing.” I pointed out that I had already taken typing, and ended up with an A in it. “Fine, then you’ll take Typing II.” I was made to spend a period in a basement room with a bunch of freshman girls, and my curriculum consisted of going through a book entitled “Typing Business Forms: 200 exercises.” No instruction, just follow the book and type. Fortunately I got to use the one IBM Selectric in the classroom, and work independently. It ended up being a fast, easy way to a nice GPA padding A.
The ‘bcc’ didn’t go on all of the copies. If I remember correctly, it was on two - the bcc recipient’s copy and the sender’s copy.
Anyone remember onionskin paper, for use with carbon copies? My dad’s copies of his military citations (Vietnam era) were all on that kind of paper. I remember it being sold in grocery stores as late as the late 80s or so.
Yeah… we still had some around about the time we started using typewriters with transfer film ribbons instead of ink ribbons. We had to throw it away; the letters would fall off the page.