OLD SCHOOL TECH

Having just placed an announcement in a newspaper for an elderly relative's 90th birthday, it reminded me of some of the old school tech that's been and gone. I imagine placing announcements and messages in papers will be a thing of the past one day too.

Regarding messages, I do recall sending the odd telegram. You rang the GPO and later BT to tell them the message you wanted sending on nice paper to someone, maybe for a last minute wedding wish or exam congrats. I'm not sure how much notice you had to give the GPO/BT but the message arrived like a letter and probably went first class. You could choose different backgrounds in the paper and envelope too! How cool was that!

Someone once told me you could stick a stamp on anything and shove it in a post box. As long as it wasn't dangerous it would be sent in the post to the address shown. I think a banana was the example used as it has its own handy packaging. I've never tried it and I digress unless of course you have readers!

Fax was a thing I enjoyed doing. Faxing stuff. It was an essential business tool when I worked in a company in the 90's and 00's. You could also photocopy a single sheet really quickly which was very handy if the big office copier had run out of toner! The advent of email made faxing redundant but it was great fun. Did you like faxing?

Telex was and is a mystery to me and I've never telexed anything. Have you readers?

Electric typewriters were superb things I remember, especially with the typo-correct facility, a sort of machine tippex. I actually think the letter was lifted back off the paper rather than being painted over. The sound of the electric typewriter was pure magic. What do you think?

Carbon paper goes right back to my childhood and I really loved copying stuff via the blue sheets of waxy carbon. A carbon copy was a lovely thing, slightly foggy and smudgy. When I first started doing old toys mail-order sales lists to send out in the post in 1990 I used carbon paper to increase the stack and somewhere I still have one or two of those early lists when I was called Moon Zero Toys.

Last but not least on this mini-journey into long lost behaviour are those tasks you could ask the house phone to do. Most often was the speaking clock, which was sponsored by Accurist I seem to recall. You could also get a wake-up call anytime of the day or night, which I did now and then in the late 70's and 80's. My Missus even asked for a bedtime story for our daughter in the mid-80's! You could probably get the phone to do other things back then, sort of smart after all! What did you do on the landline readers?

What other old school tech was there?