The Ditto Machine or the Mimeograph Machine was a low tech xerox machine. It was a cheap way for schools to copy assignments or papers. It was a small hand cranked machine that would copy or print papers. You could hear the office worker cranking away in there all day.
Our school had one machine for the whole school. I remember our teacher would have to plan her classes to the latest batch of dittos. When she didn’t, we would have to wait and become restless. Those pages could make for a bad morning if they weren’t cranked fast enough.
When they were brought in, my teacher would stand there in front of each row, count the students, and hand a stack to the first row kid and we would have to “take one and pass it back”.
The pages were a pale blue color and sometimes they wouldn’t print dark enough or words would be missing. They kinda had a distant scent too.
You had to be careful, if you would handle enough of them or they wouldn’t be dry, your hands would get covered in blue ink.
We had one in grade school that we just played with as a toy and it never had any ink.
Whoa, I do not remember these at all.
I still remember the mimeograph ink smell. It was nauseating, yet nostalgic at the same time.
@fluffy: I was going to mention that. It’s an unique smell of alcohol, ink, and heavens knows what else. But I remember the pages being purple, not faint blue. I loved the smell, but hated the contends of the mimiographed pages – usually they were used on tests, in my school.
when I went to the grammer school (from 1990), that “xerox machine” (which we simply called “spiritus copier”) was in its final throes. We had plenty other copiers (where the fastest could print 150 pages per min), but some of the older teachers still used that old spiritus machine because of nostalgic feelings. Our copied pages where pale violet and had the smell of spiritus. Somehow I was missing something when that old machine was taken out of service…
Ha – I remember those. We already had regular copy machines at our school, but teachers had to pay for copies so most of them still used those things.
I’m so glad that somebody else remembers that they were called “dittos”.