Subject Re: Closing an image on a form From Mervyn Bick <invalid@invalid.invalid> Date Mon, 5 Apr 2021 09:41:17 +0200 Newsgroups dbase.getting-started On 2021/04/04 16:35, Ronnie MacGregor wrote: > Ahhh . . . Giving your age away there !! > > I think they were called Banda Machines in the UK. Roneo and Gestener used wax stencils with a paper backing.  One normally used a typewriter (with the ribbon moved away) but one could also use a stylus for making diagrams or hand lettering.  Getting rid of used stencils was a messy business. > Actually, in primary school, age 9 or 10, I remember producing a school > pamphlet in a purpley blue and red. Ground breaking approach at the time > to use two colours, and had to get permission from the head, as I had > doubled the production costs !! The Banda machine masters were created by writing or typing on a sheet of paper with a special "carbon paper" coated with a very waxy ink behind the paper with the "inky" side against the paper. In the 1970's Mignon used a spirit copier to make work-sheets for her Grade 1 class.  The purpley-blue was the basic colour but she also had several different colours available.  As the sheets were used up it became more and more difficult to find a suitable area of ink but the budget was too tight to throw partly used ink sheets away. Virtually every school had a Banda machine and one could actually buy books of Banda masters for worksheets for different subjects if the budget would stretch that far. Mignon's elder sister was also a teacher and she worked at a school that didn't have a Banda machine.  She used a jelly-bed.  The master was transferred to a bed of gelatin and then the pages to be printed were laid on the jelly-bed one by one. When I first started at the Johannesburg Council in 1967 they were using a Kodak "wet" copier. One had to make a master which had to be developed and then one could make copies.  The copies came out damp and with a definite "pong" and had to be allowed to dry before they could be used.   It was a year or so later that we got a Xerox plain paper copier.  And for years the fax machine used thermal printing.  As this faded with time all faxes were copied onto plain paper before being sent to the recipient for attention. Mervyn.