Before Xerox, there was Addressograph | Hacker News Reader

Before Xerox, there was Addressograph

pncnmnp.github.io

38 pointspncnmnp17 comments

Suppose you regularly mailed hundreds or thousands of people. How would you do it in the 1970s and 1980s? (i.e. before your office had a PC)

Method 1: have a secretarial pool type them all out each time

Method 2: if you were lucky enough to have a photocopier, keep the list on paper and photocopy them into labels. How do you delete someone? Whiteout that square. How do you add a new address? Find a recently blanked out square

By the way… in the 1980s nearly every company bought at least one PC. Why? To manage their customer mailing lists and print labels. It was a BFD when you consider how inefficient Method 1 and 2 were.

Fun fact: Reagan got elected promising to “run Government like a business” (meaning … efficient). After 12 years of Reagan/Bush, the Clinton administration was surprised to find the previous administration was using “Method 1”… not even Method 2!! Mr. “Run Government like a business” didn’t do the modernizing step that all video adds had done in those 12 years.

I worked as a secretary in a brokerage firm in 1987. They had electronic typewriters with name/address storage and mail merge functionality. I'm sure PCs must've come in only a few years later, but it was definitely possible before then.

IBM selectrics were essentially word processors. The input and output made an easy transition into the current office environment. Paper and a rollerball was far superior to any printer or monitor I saw in those days.

Earlier Selectrics were completely electromechanical, with no storage or word processing features. They were just electric typewriters with a different mechanism. I learned to type on one in high school, the summer before taking my first programming course, when they were still teaching typing on electric typewriters and there were about eight terminals total on the campus PDP-11.

The Selectric wasn't the only single-element typewriter design. There was also a Triumph-Adler design which used a cylindrical type element instead of a ball.

Thank you, I think the Selectric is a pretty interesting device. Your story makes it sound like the role earlier filled by the Friden Flexowriter. I imagine it was pretty easy for the Selectric to out do the Flexowriter for most things and the output could be easily duplicated at a certain point.

Any insight on friden flexowriter?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friden_Flexowriter

Flexowriter was VERY before my time. State-of-the-art circa 1980 was the DEC LA120 (DECWriter III), a dot-matrix printing terminal with a logic-seeking printhead that absolutely smoked the neighboring LA36.

There were Selectrics set up as terminals, though, as the mechanism was well-suited for it. I think IBM called it a 2741. I never saw such a beast, though.

All that was needed to make a Selectric into a terminal was essentially a box to take the electrical signals of hitting the keys (that triggered the correct letter on the ball to strike the ribbon) and amplify/send them to an interface into a device that could take TTY. Early word-processors and cold-type machines used this since those Selectrics were ubiquitous and dang durable.

The other big tech news about the young Clinton Whitehouse was the George Stephanopoulos<sp?) used a pager.

Addressograph machines were widely used well into the 1980s. There were two basic machines, the metal plate embosser [1] and the imprinter. The magazine mailing and junk mail industry were once powered by those things. Only with the recent disappearance of embossed credit cards did this technology finally go away.

[1] https://www.newboldcorp.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Addre...

There is also the Bates stamp:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bates_numbering

I got one of these for a Christmas gag gift when I was in Google Legal. What's amazing is, in legal docs they still sometimes refer to the Bates page number even though no one uses these.

I have one of those. It's the one shown in Wikipedia. When I was doing a steampunk telegraph office at steampunk conventions, we had many antique office props, all working. All the telegrams got stamped with that.

Not only does it still work, despite being over a century old, you can still get the ink pads for it.

One of the key contributions of addressograph technology in its early days was to reduce credit card fraud.

Card owners would deny that they dined—-whereas merchants notoriously would add charges to cards even if patrons never visited their stores.

There are lots of layers and history in this part of fintech fraud cycle.

Comes the addressograph POS imprinter where it would take a “copy” of your card numbers and have you sign it!

Aside, credit card history and evolution using is just amazing.

I got my first credit card (and had retail jobs) _just_ at the end of the era when you could pull out an imprinter with carbon paper and buy stuff that way. Madness compared to having to do chip + pin, 2fa with my phone, etc. I wonder if it's even still possible to do an old-fashioned CC sale? I haven't hard a card with raised numbers in some time.

A&M (later A&M Intl to sound more sophisticated) made some interesting equipment from its various divisions. Their Multigraph division long made duplicators for secretaries etc. They also introduced an office copier that sorta functioned like what Xerox came up with but minus the Xerographic process (sorta like a hybrid spirit duplicator on steroids). Like this one in this vintage ad: https://www.ebay.com/itm/274448810068. A&M's Varityper division produced some really innovative cold-type products and they were probably 3rd among the big names of the day CompuGraphic, Linotype (LinoTronic) with their Comp/Edit series of electro-mechanical typesetting gear. There was also AM Jacquard division which sold a word processing/editing setup that was seen to complement their typesetting division. I never saw one of those in person, primarily I was trained on the Varityper CompEdit and later digital version. Desktop publishing ended its existence as management didn't know how to integrate those systems into desktop publishing. Typesetting used to be an independent task, one would enter the text into a composition system where it could be edited and manipulated for page, letter, word, and character spacing depending upon the medium of output. DP combined all those functions and allowed you to WYSIWYG it before even printing it out. Linotype survived a little while longer with their system the Linotronic because they knew that essentially if they made a "printer" aka the imagesetter that outputs the films necessary for plate making they could eke out an existence (they're now owned by their longtime rival Monotype!).

I can still see in my head how to compose a line in the CompEdit, perhaps it was like a pseudo comp language in that you could specify line length, drop-cap, leading, tracking, kerning, etc all via commands. I guess the equivalent of WordPerfect's codes but with maximum strength.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AM_Jacquard_Systems https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10273361... https://www.facebook.com/Varityper/ http://pdf.textfiles.com/jscott/1980-varityper-brochure.pdf

Isn't something like a mimeograph or letter press closer to a xerox? This is like the predecessor to mail merge or label printers.

Mimeograph aka spirit duplicator used a stencil that you could write on or type on and then use alcohol to then dissolve the raised part of the stencil and transfer it onto the paper. It worked well for simple stuff but kinda poorly for halftones and could prob only provide 300 copies before you'd need a new stencil.

Xerographic from Greek "dry writing" differs in that you use a fine powder (toner) that can be electrostatically charged and then drawn to paper using a light-sensitive drum.

The genius of the AM machine is that it could be used to print on practically any medium including metal, dogtags were printed in this way. Also, data could be saved in either punchcard format or later electronically. The last big use was for imprinting credit cards.

I've worked at a few different hospitals that still use addressograph imprinters with plastic cards to label reqs, stickers, and chart sheets. I imagine it's a niche skill to maintain these machines.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com