Hot Slut Of The Day!
The Ditto machine!
Us musty-smelling, grey pubes-having, wrinkled-up olds who were lucky enough to live through the 80s definitely throw a look of sympathy at the kids today who can easily make boring unscented copies using a boring WiFi-enabled printer. They never got to experience the technological wonder of the Ditto machine!
The Ditto machine, which Wikipedia says is also known as a spirit duplicator (it did cause my spirit to duplicate with joy several times), was a heavy machine that was used in many schools to make copies of worksheets, or whatever. It was invented in 1923 by German inventor Wilhelm Ritzerfeld. It didn’t use ink ink. It used a solvent (like alcohol which is why it’s called a “spirit duplicator”) to transfer wax (which was usually purple because purple was the cheapest color) from a master copy to paper.
Our school had one ditto machine and it was heavily guarded (by the 60-something-year-old school secretary) in a secret chamber (a tiny room next to the nurse’s office). I’ve heard some people say that their teacher let them operate the ditto machine, and that hits the WUT? switch in my brain. Who are these teachers that let unskilled brats operate such a precious machine? Our teacher would let two of us take the master copy to the office, but only a skilled professional (a 6th grader who volunteered in the office) could use the Ditto machine. Behold, the Ditto machine at work. (And yes, just when I thought that I couldn’t love the Ditto machine more, I find out that Dick models of it existed):
The Xerox machine later killed the Ditto machine and then digital copies killed the Xerox machine.
I can still smell a fresh-off-the-Ditto-machine copy. It smells like grade school in the 80s. So sadly for kids of today, they don’t get to kill brain cells by inhaling the sweet chemical scent of a Ditto machine copy.
Pic: Imgrum