Awww the 1990s and printers that takes me back.

Real greymuzzles remember duplicators with the purple ink that smelled like liquorice!

My high school used one of those. Hand-cranked.

What stuck in my mind was the receipts that smelled like carrots.

I remember the sheets our teacher used to give us that had ink like that. I had no idea what a Ditto Machine was back then.

Actually this is a mimeo machine. Ditto was the trademark of a spirit duplicator, that used alcohol to dissolve ink from a coated sheet that you typed on. Mimeo is a more involved process, using paste-like ink that rollers spread and then then impressed on a sheet paper that was feed through, either automatically or by hand. The results were usually much better, and didn't fade (which Ditto did).

And the next step beyond that would have been a Lithograph printer like the one on the USS Salem, which the crew used to print a newsletter regularly. The machine dates from the 50s and still works perfectly today.

Yup.

That new fanzine smell! 😝

Fanzines! How quaint!

Practically extinct. There is a small coterie of people who publish fanzines in PDF format, but the glory days are long gone. Or are they. An even smaller number of fans still publish on paper, making a really bid deal of it, with bound, type-set editions that only the most elite are selected to receive ... everyone else pays cash, and can run up to $10 each. I think it's mostly snobbery, actually, and the material is no better than most digital fanzines.