Today it is hard to imagine life without the electrostatic copier or Xerox machine. When I started teaching, however, there were basically only two methods of preparing class hand-outs: the mimeograph and the ditto machines. Both demanded preparing a master copy which was then attached to a rotating drum or printer. The mimeograph used a thick black ink which was pressed through a stencil and was beyond messy. The ditto (or “spirit” copier) used methylated spirits as a solvent to dissolve a purplish-blue ink that had been embedded in the paper when you typed it, and the fumes were rumored to make you high. Both systems were highly unreliable. If you needed 25 copies for a class, the machine would jam at 19.

Preparing class materials was only one part of the inconvenient world before Xerox. All through my college career I had had to take hand written notes. I understood that notes from class lectures were part of the job of being a student, but you also had to take pages and pages of hand written notes from books that you didn’t own. Whole chapters in books had to be outlined in notes because the professors would make reading assignments in books that were on hold in the library. (Presumably, this was so that you wouldn’t have to buy a whole book in order to read and understand a few of its pages.) At the library, you could only check out the book for a couple of hours at a time. Murray reminded me that the worst case scenario in this system was that someone had simply cut or ripped out the chapter of the book before you got to it.

I remember the first time I had access to a Xerox machine at the SF State Library. Rather than outlining a chapter from a book the professor had put on reserve, I could pay a few quarters and copy the chapter and take it home with me! Rather than tracing an image by hand, I could just copy it! What joy, though a bit expensive.

It would be a few years before the cost of Xeroxing became competitive with ditto and Mimeograph machines, but it eventually did, and preparing class materials was changed for the better, forever, as were many other daily life aspects of documentation.