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Old 15th Mar 2018, 10:31 pm   #41
Skywave
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Bygone tech.: d.c. mains is an obvious choice. So are 2 v. lead-acid batteries in a glass jar. 'Fridges that ran off street-mains gas. (When I was a kiddie, we had one in the kitchen - made by Electrolux, strangely.)
Brownie box-camera.
rho-detectors: an R.F. device. 3 ports: one for one for the reference resistance, one for the unknown Z and one which produced a d.c. voltage. Was used as a crude impedance measuring device. (I even have one in my collection of 'bits-'n'-bobs').
The high-pressure steam engine, invented by Richard Trevithick, as used for pumping water from Cornish tin mines.

And dare I add carbon-paper?

Al.

Last edited by Skywave; 15th Mar 2018 at 10:38 pm.
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Old 15th Mar 2018, 10:38 pm   #42
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What about the 'GESTETNER' [?] copier. Worked by burning tiny holes in a revolving sheet which could then be used as a screen for printing mono copies. Very good quality but took around 30 mins to produce the 'master'. Also very expensive! I used one when I was 16. John.
The Gestetner paper plant wasn't far from here. At the end of its drive, down at the main road they had a big sign with just "GESTETNER" on it.

I always felt it was a shame that they didn't have a series of identical but overlapping signs.

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Old 15th Mar 2018, 10:57 pm   #43
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Wasn't there another duplicating process called Roneo?

I think they had a factory in Norwich.
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Old 15th Mar 2018, 11:04 pm   #44
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I've not come across that version of creating Gestetner stencils. My experience largely consisted of using a typewriter without its ribbon to cut (most of the way) through the stencil, or occasionally adding diagrams by drawing with a sharp stylus - being very careful to make sure sections didn't become detached in the process, though the typewriting often did detach the bits inside loops within letters.

The technique described by HKS sounds more flexible. How was the burning process controlled though?
Gestafax. The machine used a photomultiplier tube, whose output was amplified to control the current across a tiny spark gap between a static electrode and the cutting drum, via the stencil. They could be a pain to set up, as they were prone to drift, and you couldn't really tell how good the results were until you ran the duplicator. Most people used them only to produce halftone work, which was then spliced into the line stencil, partly due to the cost of the special stencils and partly because the process produced lousy line work.
They also produced a peculiar odour - a mixture of ozone and hot wax, but quite unlike a vintage TV!
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Old 15th Mar 2018, 11:22 pm   #45
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Wasn't there another duplicating process called Roneo?

I think they had a factory in Norwich.
Yes indeed - the same process as Gestetner's (mimeograph), but far superior machines, IMHO. Rather than being looped between rollers, Roneo stencils were fitted round a drum, and lasted much longer as they were effectively static.
I believe Roneo were taken over by the Vickers corporation - certainly, small offset litho machines (another vanishing technology) were produced under the Roneo Vickers banner.
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Old 16th Mar 2018, 12:53 am   #46
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Originally Posted by Heatercathodeshort View Post
What about the 'GESTETNER' [?] copier. Worked by burning tiny holes in a revolving sheet which could then be used as a screen for printing mono copies. Very good quality but took around 30 mins to produce the 'master'. Also very expensive! I used one when I was 16. John.
By the 80's the company had produced duplicators that were cheaper and faster than photocopies. The even had a stencil cutter. You put the artwork (it could be anything) around one end of a tube, then a stencil around the other part. An electric eye then travel across the tube has it span around fast. The artwork being transferred to the stencil, by a spark which made holes in the stencil. You could get stencils that would print 2000 copies before they deteriorated. You could always scan the image again, if more were needed.
The duplicators were electric powered and worked by sucking ink from a "toothpaste" type tube. You could even get ones that could print using coloured ink.
The process was simple, quick, clean and easy to use.
All you had to watch for was paper jams and over inking. Cured by slowing the printer down.
We used to use one for a monthly community newspaper printed on three sheets of American foolscap two thousand copies. Generally we had the lot printed in a day.
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Old 16th Mar 2018, 1:10 am   #47
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Nobody I knew *ever* saved the cost of the box/subscriotion-to-a-secondary-phone-service by cheaper calls.
I saved money by using CLEAR when they first started here, but never had a box - you just dialled 050 before the call, and they even gave you stickers to put on your phone to remember them ("People in the know dial 050") - from memory they were about 4c/minute cheaper than Telecom with no subscription charge, which was quite a lot in a student flat in Dunedin!

Once they had enough subscribers you could nominate them for all toll calls, so 050 disappeared except for the 0508 toll-free numbers which are still around. CLEAR got bought out by Telstra to become TelstraClear, and then eventually by Vodafone NZ.

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A couple of decades back there was a 'thing' that was often deployed by BT in rural areas where there was insufficient physical phone-line capacity: if you wanted two phone lines to a premises they fitted this thing to your line - it essentially split the available upstream bandwidth between the two voice-grade lines.
Aah the 1+1 - we had one installed in the first house we rented so I could run the BBS from there, as there weren't enough pairs in the street. No end of calls to faults - the 14.4k modem was ok most of the time, but sometimes we had random disconnects and things. That was solved when we bought a house about six months later, but the BBS only lasted another two months - along with the Sky subscription - as the reality of being on a graduate salary with a new wife and house hit home!
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Old 16th Mar 2018, 8:25 am   #48
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You can still get copiers that use a drum and master system I had one a few years ago.
Risograph make them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risograph

John
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Old 16th Mar 2018, 10:10 am   #49
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Thinking of obsolete photocopier-type technology, there was a precursor to the Fax-machine called a Fultograph: it used a chemically-treated paper which contained starch and something (potassium iodide?). The paper was slowly drawn across an earthed metal platen (providing the vertical component of the 'scan') while an electrode was moved back and forth horizontally across the surface. Applying DC to the electrode caused the dissociation of the chemical releasing elemental Iodine, which stained the starch in the paper.

I know it was used in some WWII-era ASDIC-type systems as the display, because CRTs of the time didn't have the required persistence to display several minutes of the classic "PING!.....pip.........PING!.....pip........PING!. ....pip" as you chased your U-boat.

It also reappeared in the 1950s as "Mufax" by Muirhead&co. this time with the paper wrapped round a rotating drum, and was used extensively to transmit weather-maps to airfields etc.

I remember seeing one in use at Manchester airport some time in the mid/late-1960s (other family members were more interested in trying to see The Beatles who were flying in that day).
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Old 16th Mar 2018, 10:57 am   #50
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How about dot-matrix printers?

Very noisy things for which soundproof enclosures were available. These made useful cold frames for use in the garden once laser printers came along.
For some reason you still see these at airports printing off manifests...
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Old 16th Mar 2018, 11:01 am   #51
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Telex (Teleprinters)...
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Old 16th Mar 2018, 11:22 am   #52
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A social club I belonged to had a manually-operated Gestetner for printing its monthly newsletter. it was kept in a spare room at my house for a while until we discovered the joys of offset litho: no more taking turns at turning the crank on bulletin evening! I remember the toothpaste-type tube of black ink it had to be fed with. I still have a bottle of the correcting fluid you could use to make corrections to the stencils somewhere.

AFAIR dot matrix printers are still being manufactured, and now cost several hundred pounds. It was mentioned on a thread on this forum some years ago that they were being used by tattoo artists for making stencils.

The Roneo works at Romford have long since disappeared, but the name lingers on: the road junction it was on a corner of is still called "Roneo Corner".
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Old 16th Mar 2018, 12:18 pm   #53
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The Roneo works at Romford have long since disappeared, but the name lingers on: the road junction it was on a corner of is still called "Roneo Corner".
As was noted upthread, Roneo merged with Vickers and became at one point a big player in the supply of general office-stuff like filing-cabinets, desks, 'modular' furniture etc.

They used to have a factory at South Marston just outside Swindon for this sort of thing: a bit of a comedown from the days when the same factory was churning out Spitfires! [Vickers having taken over Supermarine some time in the late-1940s: to this day the South Marston rugby-club is still called "Supermarine RFC"].

What was the Vickers factory is now a general industrial-estate, but there is a "Supermarine Road" there to remind people of its past.
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Old 16th Mar 2018, 12:43 pm   #54
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Default Re: Bygone Technology and Useless Items.

Electronic Organisers now, like so many other things, replaced by the Smart Phone.
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Old 16th Mar 2018, 1:25 pm   #55
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Filofaxes.
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Old 16th Mar 2018, 2:16 pm   #56
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8-track

I know - somebody loves them, but they were never really good enough to bother with.

David
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Old 16th Mar 2018, 2:25 pm   #57
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And those desktop rotating alphabetic file-index things people used to have to store their phone-numbers and customer/supplier data in.

Rolodex? Yes, thats what I remember them being called. You turned a knob on the side and the cards flipped-over like the flaps in the old mechanical-electric digital clocks

Another bit of now-utterly-obsolete technology: Book-style Encyclopedias! Redundant now, along with their 1990s replacement, "Microsoft Encarta".

Who also remembers Autoroute? Made obsolete by the appearance of satnavs (themselves being rapidly displaced by the ubiquity of GPS-enabled phones).
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Old 16th Mar 2018, 2:30 pm   #58
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One my my college tutors used to work installing computers in offices.

He mentioned daisywheel printers normally needed acoustic cabinets or put in a separate print room as they were so loud in operation.

8 tracks had the odd advantage of being a standard for quad recordings, which used a number of matrixing systems, which meant users were either tied to releases using one method, or buying a lot of expensive equipment.
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Old 16th Mar 2018, 2:44 pm   #59
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Another bit of now-utterly-obsolete technology: Book-style Encyclopedias! Redundant now, along with their 1990s replacement, "Microsoft Encarta".
Widening that out a bit, I have a Kindle Ereader and run a Kindle app on my PC's and Smart Phone. There's nothing to beat the feel of a book or even a sheet of paper in your hands though.
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Old 16th Mar 2018, 2:59 pm   #60
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Rolodex? Yes, thats what I remember them being called. You turned a knob on the side and the cards flipped-over like the flaps in the old mechanical-electric digital clocks
Which itself reminds me: Solari indicators, mostly used as departure boards in railway stations. When I lived in Germany in the 1990s they were ubiquitous on station platforms and, with local experience, it became possible to tell how the trains were running just by listening to the clattering sound they made!

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