Carbon Paper ?

[blemt]

People who use fountain pens shouldn't complain about feeling old or dated.

 

I remember being fascinated by 8 track tapes. My parents had a combo turntable and no 8 tracks. (Very unhip parents I had). I was 11 or 12 when I finally found a used one in the record store. I had to beg my dad to get it. I can't even recall who the artist was...

 

One of the big deals in elementary school was getting to go use the evil and ancient dittomaster. Ah those were the days. You got to carry back stacks of illegible fuzzy blue forms and thought you were king of the world. Another thing kids today don't remember is rotary phone modems. Try explaining to them how we used to get onto the internet. The look of horror and confusion is priceless.

 

The last place I used carbon paper was in the credit card charge slips. When I started working retail you had the three layer form- one for the customer, one for the store, one for corporate/the bank. Two layers of carbon paper in between. Learning how to snap the form apart without tearing everything to shreds was an art form.

 

I do not miss that.

Edited March 15, 2011 by blemt

[Silvermink]

Don't feel bad, the pulse or touchtone was controlled by the equipment in the central office so it may not have worked until they changed the equipment. I remember when you had to pay extra for touchtone service, any color of phone besides black, any style of phone like a "Princess" or "Trimline" and each extension phone in your house EVERY month.

 

See, I figured the pulse setting was there for some reason!

[Phormula]

One of the good things I remember of the typewriter and carbon paper age was that people, including myself, used to think a little more before starting to actually write. And since the only way to make changes to a typed letter was to re-type it from the beginning, more often than not everything was OK from the beginning. :roflmho: :roflmho: :roflmho:

[Nuclear_Duchess]

I simultaneously love and loathe carbon paper. We don't have a till in the shop so have to write out every receipt by hand, with carbon paper to make duplicates.

 

I purposefully bought an old telephone with the circular dial, just because I like the satisfying sound it makes when it returns to its central position!

[HDoug]

I can still smell that odor from the mimeo machine....weird

 

Me too, and it brings a happy feeling. In the first grade we'd get mimeographed sheets when it was "coloring" day -- we could play with our crayons. The smell was the tipoff and everyone was "yay coloring day!"

 

Doug

[funkypeanut]

Gosh. Is this showing my age (Youngish as it may be) that I still remember carbon-paper?

 

Maybe not in a writing sense, but still.

 

My grandmother, a professional tailor for 40 years, used to have stacks of carbon-paper in her bedroom. She would pin the cloth to the carbon-paper with pins. Flip it over and then with this special corrugated wheel she would trace out the outline or cut of the cloth. The wheel would press into the carbon-paper and leave a faint outline on the cloth which she could then cut along with her scissors.

 

I haven't seen carbon-paper like that in YEARS. Not since my gran moved to a retirement home, and that was nearly 10 years ago.

 

This can still be had, and I happen to have some in my sewing box, but I never use it, probably because I hardly ever sew.

 

We had a dittograph in the office when I was grad school, but they took it away when the undergrads figured out that they could get into the used roll of ditto paper and find the masters for exams.

[GoldenGirl]

I can still smell that odor from the mimeo machine....weird

 

Me too, and it brings a happy feeling. In the first grade we'd get mimeographed sheets when it was "coloring" day -- we could play with our crayons. The smell was the tipoff and everyone was "yay coloring day!"

 

Doug

 

My grade school dittoed all of our work pages LOL

[alexander_k]

I've used quite a lot of carbon paper in my youth and I just hated it. I hated having to press hard, I hated the faintness of the copies, the colours (especially the black or rather grey ones), the smudging, the frequent accidents (e.g. some new office worker putting carbon paper upside down and writing on both sides of the original) - in short everything about it, with the possible exception that you could make a copy without electricity. Nowadays we use and rely on electricity too much but the copies are much better.

[wallylynn]

I still have ditto sheets from grade school decades ago. Sadly the smell had long faded away.

 

As for carbon paper, I still occasionally run across a stand (like at a pen show) that imprints your credit card. And sometimes there's still the carbonless copies.

[mstone]

And sometimes there's still the carbonless copies.

 

Carbonless copies will probably be around for a while, leading future generations wonder what exactly they're less of.

[aderoy]

Yikes, I have graphite paper here... used for transferring a drawing pattern on to wood for carving. Instead of the blue carbon, it uses a basically pencil graphite. http://www.LeeValley.com

 

Comes in handy to say the least.

[wallylynn]

Carbonless copies will probably be around for a while, leading future generations wonder what exactly they're less of.

I did and still wonder. I don't think I've ever seen carbon paper use carbon, just wax, and usually blue/purple wax.

 

Heh, I used to enjoy making "copies" onto carbonless paper without marking the original top layer.

[Alice L]

Does anyone remember if CCs were generally signed separately, just like the original, if it was a letter - or left blank, which is what I think I remember.

 

 

 

You remember correctly, Beak. The original was signed, and the signature line on the copies was left blank.

[SamCapote]

There were many government forms that had as many as 5-6 copies, using very thin paper. All my Navy orders and honorable discharge DD-214 had many CC pages and that unique OCR type font in the Selectric typewriters. Many times you would get a CC that had the imprint copy from the original signature page. That was a lot more common than removing the carbon before signing. Sometimes people would initial the carbon pages with a pen, but they didn't sign them again. The Navy desk jockeys would guard those Selectric "golf ball" font heads. You had to use a powerful typewriter to penetrate that many pages.

 

I remember having to backup a more average typewriter sometimes and retype all the letters to double strike so it would go through several pages of carbon. This was before electric typewriters, where you had to really wail down on the keys to manually slam them hard onto the paper with carbon copies. The convention for making a typo was to XXX it out and retype correction next to it. At some point, "White Out" liquid came out, and you would manually paint out the mistake, wait for it to dry, and retype over it. Then came dry white paper where you would backup, re-strike the same error key and have it put a white "ink" to cover the mistaken letter. Then there were the plastic type ribbons, and the really deluxe electric typewriters had another cartridge of scotch tape (lol...there's another brand imprinting) and a "correction key" that would automatically back up the typewriter, remembering the last key typed, and retype it onto the scotch tape, thereby removing the mistaken letter(s). It had some sort of memory chip that I think could remember a whole row or two of letters you could erase. Kids loved playing with that.

[FearNot]

I suspect that as long as there are governments there will be carbon paper. I remember hoarding those Selectric balls in the Air Force too.

 

Wasn't it DittoMaster or Mimeograph that smelled like bananas?

 

By the way, I always thought cc stood for, "courtesy copy".

Edited March 20, 2011 by FearNot

[Soot]

SamCapote--

You really got your copywriters history nailed down! LOL. I remember the "correction key" typewriters; I recall we had one in the house, and that was really a neat feature! No, I didn't play with them, mom didn't allow that. LOL~

[Tweel]

I thought the bauhaus-y packaging of this carbon paper was interesting. The box was still sealed, so of course I had to open it. The carbon paper was nicely wrapped in tissue paper... and stinky (not a "solvent" smell as you'd expect, but a funky organic smell)!

 

http://i174.photobucket.com/albums/w88/Tweel6510/Stationery/3292_Carbon-1.jpg

 

 

http://i174.photobucket.com/albums/w88/Tweel6510/Stationery/3293_Carbon-2.jpg

 

 

http://i174.photobucket.com/albums/w88/Tweel6510/Stationery/3294_Carbon-3.jpg

[SamCapote]

I wonder what's different with that "solvent" paper. I don't see it available anywhere. There used to be some made by Nu-Kote, but they went bankrupt a couple years ago.

[csmorris]

You mean a mimeograph?

 

 

 

Hey, these aren't that old! I remember using them when I started working for the railway (wait a minute, maybe that was a while ago). I remember the older more beat up machines being very picky with the priming. If you got carried away you went home from work looking like a Smurf because you got covered with the liquified blue "ink" from the back of the master!

 

Wow... feeling kinda old now.

[csmorris]

A few sheets still come in the back of each "Field Message Pad" or FMP I've seen used in the Canadian Forces. Still the best and fastest way to make copies when all you have is a pencil and paper at your disposal!