(No Geezer tag here, of course, because Frazz explains the reference and it’s just a MacGuffin anyway)
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Certainly the mimeograph was still in use at my rural high school when I graduated in 1977, and I suspect it held on for several years afterward. Mrs. Olsen is probably in her early 60s, so it seems entirely plausible that she could have used the mimeograph when she first started teaching.
I was using it still in early 1980s, ’til copy machines became affordable for the school district to invest in. Ah, that smell . . . and blue fingers if you weren’t careful.
Mimeograph usually used a thick black ink. What seems to be described here is more like a spirit copier, which frequently duplicated in purple. I have used both extensively, the mimeograph back to the ’40s.
My shop teacher still used one in middle school (~1992). He hated photocopiers, for some odd reason.
You’e right – I guess mimeograph was just easier to say than spirit copier, which kind of sounds as though someone is able to copy a spirit. ‘-)
Today I learned . . .
That mimeo machines and ditto machines are different!
Reading the strip, was sure that I, currently mid-40’s, had seen them at school when I was a kid, but it seems in fact that the purple ink (ok, “dye”) machine was a competing technology.
I hadn’t heard of spirit duplicators but it turns out that was what we had at my school in the mid-70s, but in the UK they were known as Banda machines. The school newspaper illustrated in the Wiki article about them looks almost exactly like a copy of Viewpoint, the school newspaper (ie, produced by the pupils, not the nixes) in my school.
Billybob, I hope you’re sitting down for this… that was 43 years ago. So Mrs. O would have been way too young to have been teaching .
Mimeographs are still used by some science fiction fans with retro tech interests to produce their fanzines; I even know a local fan who collects mimeographs (he has a big basement). For that matter, I’ve got one in my own basement, but I think it was last actually used back in the early 1980s, and then by my wife rather than myself. (But I have typed a number of mimeograph stencils, run off copies, and collated some back in my distant youth and youth-ish-sorta years.) Ditto masters also.
I had for justg one year the experience of using a Thermofax copy system. Instead of typing (or trying to draw!) on a Ditto master, you just took your visual materials to the Thermofax and it used some sort of optical/chemical/thermal process to deposit the ink onto something which would serve as a Ditto master. Which you then used in the Ditto machine to make your copies.
And that was in 1972/3, at SUNY Buffalo.
Update (semi-correction) : At https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermofax I learned that Thermofax meant a number of other things more often than the use I was recalling. Still, they did mention that: Thermofax machines can be used to make a “spirit master” for spirit duplicator machines.
I used a ditto machine when I was in grade school in the 70’s. So Mrs. Olsen certainly could have had direct experience using one.
I thought a mimeograph was Marcel Marceau’s signature.
Direct experience, yes. I did as well. But not as a TEACHER.
I keep wondering about the context in which she would have mentioned a mimeograph, and then regretted it.
My wife started teaching in the late 80s, and they still had and used Ditto machines (spirit duplicators) and mimeographs. So, teachers in their mid-fifties can remember using these duplicators. It would be unlikely that a teacher in her 60s would NOT remember using these devices.
“…that was 43 years ago. So Mrs. O would have been way too young to have been teaching.” But she could have been familiar with the term from her own childhood school experiences.
“Billybob, I hope you’re sitting down for this… that was 43 years ago. So Mrs. O would have been way too young to have been teaching .”
Why? That’d only put her in her late 60s. Any way we had mimeographs at U of O is 1989 which would only put her teaching for 30 years which *surely* she has been, right?
“Mrs. O would have been way too young to have been teaching .”
They didn’t disappear 43 years ago. Mrs. Olsen’s classroom experience likely started 38-39 years ago, and she probably encountered them before that when she was majoring in education at college.
@ woozy – “…put her in her late 60s…”
I don’t know whether there is a legal or union rule requirement, but I’m pretty sure that most teachers retire at age 65.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if most schools didn’t move away from ditto copiers until they shifted to computer printers. Wealthier districts might have gone through a Xerox phase, but I bet most didn’t. If Mrs. Olsen is 65 (the upper bound on her age), she would certainly have been teaching by age 25, which would be 1979. It’s perfectly reasonable that she would have used mimeo/ditto for the first several years of her career.
“Direct experience, yes. I did as well. But not as a TEACHER.”
The youngest teachers would have been ten years older than me (student teaching in the final year of undergraduate college, grade 16 to my grade 6.) I’m 53, so a teacher of Mrs. Olsen’s age would, indeed be old enough to have experience with a mimeograph or ditto machine, as a teacher.
(I’m not sure why you insist that experience using such a machine “AS A TEACHER!” is so much different from using one as a not-teacher. But yes, she could have used a mimeograph as a teacher, and still be working as a teacher.
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised if most schools didn’t move away from ditto copiers until they shifted to computer printers.”
I would, for several reasons. First off, early 80’s printers were either Letter-Quality daisy-wheels or 9-pin dot matrix. Neither one was fast, and neither one was able to do all the things a photocopier can do (if you want to hand out a couple of pages of a book, you can photocopy them or you can carefully transcribe into a word-processing program and then print out using a 9-pin dot matrix printer. If you need a classroom set of, say, a five-page document, you’d better have all afternoon free. And both daisy-wheel and dot-matrix printing are LOUD.
In 1985, a laser printer was a $5000-dollar piece of equipment and desktop scanners were not yet widely available.
Maybe she used one as a teachers aide, or student assistant?
Still using mimeographs in a community college in early 90’s. I always instructed my students to finish the test/quiz *before* sniffing the mimeograph paper! That joke doesn’t go over well today :^(
In elementary school in the early 90s I went to what was then a small church school full of middle-class kids where most of the technical equipment was older and second-hand (donated or purchased cheaply) and they had a spirit copier/”ditto machine”. However, most teachers took to running copies at copy shops on their own dime, sometimes even literally on their own dime at grocery store and gas station photocopiers that made copies at 10 cents apiece (my father frequented these for years to print Sunday school materials). All of the teachers I had then who would still be teaching (admittedly not most of them) would certainly remember a mimeograph or ditto machine.
I agree with DemetriosX: Xerox had a very expensive leasing arrangement on their machines (in the 60’s/70’s), with a price per page that was probably beyond the budget of most school systems. My high school still had at least one “ditto” machine (which everyone called “mimeograph”, pedantics notwithstanding) into the late 70’s (and probably early 80’s); if there was a Xerox in the building, it was hidden in a place to which students did not have access.
P.S. @ Berber – I remember two or three occasions in which we (as students) were permitted (or possibly “instructed”) to create a dittomaster, and then we got to make the copies ourselves. Smelling the paper just doesn’t compare to smelling the machine in operation!
Although I never saw a mimeograph machine, I can attest that an American History class in high school back in 1991 handed out an assignment worksheet that was mimeographed. Granted, the teachers who handed out such worksheets readily admitted it was old technology.
I used one as an intern in a school circa 1993. That school choose to keep using it as it was cheaper than photocopying. That was the first and only place I saw tractor-fee computer printers with mimeograph paper. Clearly there is more overlap to technology than people are willing to credit. Granted, the time before that I saw someone using mimeograph copies was in the 80’s, when they were used regularly in my elementary school.
tractor-feed, I meant!
“. . . but I’m pretty sure that most teachers retire at age 65.”
IF they make it that long. In WI, teachers can retire at 55 with 15 years of being vested in the pension program (fully-funded, I might add, despite the previous state administration’s attempts to steal the money); secretaries, such as myself, had to wait ’til we were 57 and vested.
Believe me, the day I turned 57 (12/6/2005), I walked out the door and never looked (or went) back. (Unfortunately – 15 years later – I’m still dreaming about working, both in the library and as the copy machine person for the entire school. No wonder I wake up exhausted!)
So I went from what I called a mimeograph machine to a photocopy machine that practically picked up the original from the table, shuffled it, put in in the tray and set all its own buttons . . . of course, as we were an ‘alternative’ school [read: wrong side of the school district blanket], we got everyone’s used machines; I could only ever imagine what a brand-new photocopy machine would do (make lunch for me??), but I never found out.
[“I thought a mimeograph was Marcel Marceau’s signature.”]
And I thought spirit duplication was how ghosts reproduced.
I know the exact scenario that Mimeograph (or any older copy tech) could come up.
“So anyway Mrs. Olson was cleaning out her filing cabinet and asked me to take out a stack of pages to the recycling bin, On the top was some printouts that had blue ink and obviously made on a typewriter, “I didn’t know we had color printing back then”…..You can fill in the rest
Mrs. Olson mentioned mimeographs; she did say she used to operate the mimeograph machine. I’m 60 and my teachers used mimeos all the way through my high school years- all the students knew what a mimeo was.
BTW, mimeos are given a cure sight gag in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, so the reference at least had wide recognition then.
“if there was a Xerox in the building, it was hidden in a place to which students did not have access.”
Pardon my cynicism, but at least in the school district I worked in for 30+ years, teachers wouldn’t have access either. The best machines were for administrators; you know, the people who – for the most part – had NOTHING to do with students. Ever.
“That was the first and only place I saw tractor-fee computer printers with mimeograph paper.”
How many tractors per page? ‘-)
As a math TA in the early 80s, up to maybe 1985, we still used mimeographs (well, called them that, but the purplish ink ones). So like me, she could well be under 60 and still have used a mimeograph while teaching. Or have been my student and known about them from the quizzes.
Comics I Don't Understand 
Certainly the mimeograph was still in use at my rural high school when I graduated in 1977, and I suspect it held on for several years afterward. Mrs. Olsen is probably in her early 60s, so it seems entirely plausible that she could have used the mimeograph when she first started teaching.
I was using it still in early 1980s, ’til copy machines became affordable for the school district to invest in. Ah, that smell . . . and blue fingers if you weren’t careful.
Mimeograph usually used a thick black ink. What seems to be described here is more like a spirit copier, which frequently duplicated in purple. I have used both extensively, the mimeograph back to the ’40s.
My shop teacher still used one in middle school (~1992). He hated photocopiers, for some odd reason.
You’e right – I guess mimeograph was just easier to say than spirit copier, which kind of sounds as though someone is able to copy a spirit. ‘-)
Today I learned . . .
That mimeo machines and ditto machines are different!
Reading the strip, was sure that I, currently mid-40’s, had seen them at school when I was a kid, but it seems in fact that the purple ink (ok, “dye”) machine was a competing technology.
Check this out: http://thingsremembered.homestead.com/Remembering_the_Ditto_Machine.pdf
I was using an (actual) mimeograph until 1976.
I hadn’t heard of spirit duplicators but it turns out that was what we had at my school in the mid-70s, but in the UK they were known as Banda machines. The school newspaper illustrated in the Wiki article about them looks almost exactly like a copy of Viewpoint, the school newspaper (ie, produced by the pupils, not the nixes) in my school.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_duplicator
Billybob, I hope you’re sitting down for this… that was 43 years ago. So Mrs. O would have been way too young to have been teaching .
Mimeographs are still used by some science fiction fans with retro tech interests to produce their fanzines; I even know a local fan who collects mimeographs (he has a big basement). For that matter, I’ve got one in my own basement, but I think it was last actually used back in the early 1980s, and then by my wife rather than myself. (But I have typed a number of mimeograph stencils, run off copies, and collated some back in my distant youth and youth-ish-sorta years.) Ditto masters also.
I had for justg one year the experience of using a Thermofax copy system. Instead of typing (or trying to draw!) on a Ditto master, you just took your visual materials to the Thermofax and it used some sort of optical/chemical/thermal process to deposit the ink onto something which would serve as a Ditto master. Which you then used in the Ditto machine to make your copies.
And that was in 1972/3, at SUNY Buffalo.
Update (semi-correction) : At https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermofax I learned that Thermofax meant a number of other things more often than the use I was recalling. Still, they did mention that: Thermofax machines can be used to make a “spirit master” for spirit duplicator machines.
I used a ditto machine when I was in grade school in the 70’s. So Mrs. Olsen certainly could have had direct experience using one.
I thought a mimeograph was Marcel Marceau’s signature.
Direct experience, yes. I did as well. But not as a TEACHER.
I keep wondering about the context in which she would have mentioned a mimeograph, and then regretted it.
My wife started teaching in the late 80s, and they still had and used Ditto machines (spirit duplicators) and mimeographs. So, teachers in their mid-fifties can remember using these duplicators. It would be unlikely that a teacher in her 60s would NOT remember using these devices.
“…that was 43 years ago. So Mrs. O would have been way too young to have been teaching.” But she could have been familiar with the term from her own childhood school experiences.
“Billybob, I hope you’re sitting down for this… that was 43 years ago. So Mrs. O would have been way too young to have been teaching .”
Why? That’d only put her in her late 60s. Any way we had mimeographs at U of O is 1989 which would only put her teaching for 30 years which *surely* she has been, right?
“Mrs. O would have been way too young to have been teaching .”
They didn’t disappear 43 years ago. Mrs. Olsen’s classroom experience likely started 38-39 years ago, and she probably encountered them before that when she was majoring in education at college.
@ woozy – “…put her in her late 60s…”
I don’t know whether there is a legal or union rule requirement, but I’m pretty sure that most teachers retire at age 65.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if most schools didn’t move away from ditto copiers until they shifted to computer printers. Wealthier districts might have gone through a Xerox phase, but I bet most didn’t. If Mrs. Olsen is 65 (the upper bound on her age), she would certainly have been teaching by age 25, which would be 1979. It’s perfectly reasonable that she would have used mimeo/ditto for the first several years of her career.
“Direct experience, yes. I did as well. But not as a TEACHER.”
The youngest teachers would have been ten years older than me (student teaching in the final year of undergraduate college, grade 16 to my grade 6.) I’m 53, so a teacher of Mrs. Olsen’s age would, indeed be old enough to have experience with a mimeograph or ditto machine, as a teacher.
(I’m not sure why you insist that experience using such a machine “AS A TEACHER!” is so much different from using one as a not-teacher. But yes, she could have used a mimeograph as a teacher, and still be working as a teacher.
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised if most schools didn’t move away from ditto copiers until they shifted to computer printers.”
I would, for several reasons. First off, early 80’s printers were either Letter-Quality daisy-wheels or 9-pin dot matrix. Neither one was fast, and neither one was able to do all the things a photocopier can do (if you want to hand out a couple of pages of a book, you can photocopy them or you can carefully transcribe into a word-processing program and then print out using a 9-pin dot matrix printer. If you need a classroom set of, say, a five-page document, you’d better have all afternoon free. And both daisy-wheel and dot-matrix printing are LOUD.
In 1985, a laser printer was a $5000-dollar piece of equipment and desktop scanners were not yet widely available.
Maybe she used one as a teachers aide, or student assistant?
Still using mimeographs in a community college in early 90’s. I always instructed my students to finish the test/quiz *before* sniffing the mimeograph paper! That joke doesn’t go over well today :^(
In elementary school in the early 90s I went to what was then a small church school full of middle-class kids where most of the technical equipment was older and second-hand (donated or purchased cheaply) and they had a spirit copier/”ditto machine”. However, most teachers took to running copies at copy shops on their own dime, sometimes even literally on their own dime at grocery store and gas station photocopiers that made copies at 10 cents apiece (my father frequented these for years to print Sunday school materials). All of the teachers I had then who would still be teaching (admittedly not most of them) would certainly remember a mimeograph or ditto machine.
I agree with DemetriosX: Xerox had a very expensive leasing arrangement on their machines (in the 60’s/70’s), with a price per page that was probably beyond the budget of most school systems. My high school still had at least one “ditto” machine (which everyone called “mimeograph”, pedantics notwithstanding) into the late 70’s (and probably early 80’s); if there was a Xerox in the building, it was hidden in a place to which students did not have access.
P.S. @ Berber – I remember two or three occasions in which we (as students) were permitted (or possibly “instructed”) to create a dittomaster, and then we got to make the copies ourselves. Smelling the paper just doesn’t compare to smelling the machine in operation!
Although I never saw a mimeograph machine, I can attest that an American History class in high school back in 1991 handed out an assignment worksheet that was mimeographed. Granted, the teachers who handed out such worksheets readily admitted it was old technology.
I used one as an intern in a school circa 1993. That school choose to keep using it as it was cheaper than photocopying. That was the first and only place I saw tractor-fee computer printers with mimeograph paper. Clearly there is more overlap to technology than people are willing to credit. Granted, the time before that I saw someone using mimeograph copies was in the 80’s, when they were used regularly in my elementary school.
tractor-feed, I meant!
“. . . but I’m pretty sure that most teachers retire at age 65.”
IF they make it that long. In WI, teachers can retire at 55 with 15 years of being vested in the pension program (fully-funded, I might add, despite the previous state administration’s attempts to steal the money); secretaries, such as myself, had to wait ’til we were 57 and vested.
Believe me, the day I turned 57 (12/6/2005), I walked out the door and never looked (or went) back. (Unfortunately – 15 years later – I’m still dreaming about working, both in the library and as the copy machine person for the entire school. No wonder I wake up exhausted!)
So I went from what I called a mimeograph machine to a photocopy machine that practically picked up the original from the table, shuffled it, put in in the tray and set all its own buttons . . . of course, as we were an ‘alternative’ school [read: wrong side of the school district blanket], we got everyone’s used machines; I could only ever imagine what a brand-new photocopy machine would do (make lunch for me??), but I never found out.
[“I thought a mimeograph was Marcel Marceau’s signature.”]
And I thought spirit duplication was how ghosts reproduced.
I know the exact scenario that Mimeograph (or any older copy tech) could come up.
“So anyway Mrs. Olson was cleaning out her filing cabinet and asked me to take out a stack of pages to the recycling bin, On the top was some printouts that had blue ink and obviously made on a typewriter, “I didn’t know we had color printing back then”…..You can fill in the rest
Mrs. Olson mentioned mimeographs; she did say she used to operate the mimeograph machine. I’m 60 and my teachers used mimeos all the way through my high school years- all the students knew what a mimeo was.
BTW, mimeos are given a cure sight gag in 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, so the reference at least had wide recognition then.
“if there was a Xerox in the building, it was hidden in a place to which students did not have access.”
Pardon my cynicism, but at least in the school district I worked in for 30+ years, teachers wouldn’t have access either. The best machines were for administrators; you know, the people who – for the most part – had NOTHING to do with students. Ever.
“That was the first and only place I saw tractor-fee computer printers with mimeograph paper.”
How many tractors per page? ‘-)
As a math TA in the early 80s, up to maybe 1985, we still used mimeographs (well, called them that, but the purplish ink ones). So like me, she could well be under 60 and still have used a mimeograph while teaching. Or have been my student and known about them from the quizzes.