The Born Loser by Art and Chip Sansom for March 30, 2024

I figured he was at least up to carbon copying on the type writer.

Remember mimeographs? That smell.

Me; Smoke signals, but full duplex with error correction.

Remember those “inter office mailers”?

As soon as I was hired, I was that carrier pigeon: “Go to Mr… in the room nr … and tell him that…”

Uncle Ted must be a lot older than he looks. Must eat a diet consisting of a lot of preservatives. ;-)

My father sold fax machines in the 60s. He also worked with state legislatures to pass laws designating facsimiles as “True Copies” of original documents acceptable for court proceedings.

Remember telex machines?

Uncle Ted is cool.

Bike couriers, and runners, those were the days, no electronic data transfer just kids using public transport with all the receipts from the day and the accounting tally from every satellite store to the central accounting office in Union Square.

Oh c’mon Uncle Ted. Don’t you remember using a telegraph via Western Union?

Twitter before Twitter? ☺

I also recall the statement that computers would save billions of trees. Whoever thunk that one up? We use to make 1 original and two carbon copies. Now its 25 copies to a link and to 40 emails for their download if need be.

Flintstones was a carrier pterodactyl.

I think Ted is having Brutus on. Though Ted might remember the vacuum cylinder system used in large offices to send printed documents from one section to another. Anything outside of the building would be sent via courier or registered mail. So, the fax was a revolutionary invention. I used to repair fax machines.

Carrier pigeons are extinct now.

We used telexes and snail mail.

cleaning up after the carrier pigeons was always a hassle…

Ha! He’s as sarcastic as they come! LOLI remember turning the mimeograph for copies and the smell was pungent!

However, I loved my typewriter…Miss it, in fact!

At least, with those old interoffice mailers, we got same day service. As opposed to the USPS, which now takes several days to get to the next town over.

Oh come now Uncle Ted. We did have the Pony Express for those letters and documents that just had to get there overnight……

And thanks to those birds Uncle Ted enjoys retired life!

Uncle Ted likes playing mind games, but of course in my day we used 2 tin cans and a length of string.

Those pneumatic tubes between floors in those old buildings.

I love Uncle Ted’s self-effacing outlook on life. But it is amazing to think of the evolution in technology during my 40 year career. I can remember things like dictabelts and the IBM Selectric being seen as new high tech.

And the U.S. postal service- -so called.

Leather pouches and horseback couriers.

Just remember what things were like when you started Brutus, and that was what things were like when he finished.

We used teletypes. We had the faster 100 word per minute vs the older 60 word per minute versions. Before that we used morse code.

In the last millennium, I worked on a project for an international telecom. They offered research grants to employees, and my project collected the purpose of the project and progress reports. Every year, I re-wrote the software to use whatever new data tech was available: paper or fax that someone entered into the program, then diskettes, then e-mail, then ftp, then web. It kept me busy AND I got to travel to the UK once a year for “requirements gathering”.

An aside: I love how goComics is taking advantage of the latest tech and disallowing things like “and {slash} or” because “URLs are not allowed in the comments.”

we used to use sneaker . net to move files (go comics takes umbrage at making the term one word)

I tell them at work we didn’t have white out, we kept spackle at our desk for when we made a mistake chiseling our stone tables

I remember keypunch cards.

Sneaker Net… with pigeons.

Uncle Ted must have worked a really long time ago!

Most, if not all, of us have watched tech come and change and change and change and it will be changing forever. It’s fun to think about what the future will bring.

I’m sure it was teaching them where to go was the problem though. :}