[HN Gopher] The Exciting History of Carbon Paper! (1995)
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       The Exciting History of Carbon Paper! (1995)
        
       Author : susam
       Score  : 7 points
       Date   : 2024-01-13 20:47 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.kevinlaurence.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.kevinlaurence.net)
        
       | tpetricek wrote:
       | Carbon paper was also a key part of Samizdat production in the
       | Eastern bloc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat (which is
       | why my family still has piles of it in the attic somewhere...)
        
       | neilv wrote:
       | > _NCR is ideal for business forms produced in large quantities,
       | but is not economical for small applications. Consequently, it
       | has yet to replace carbon paper completely._
       | 
       | There were also "carbon-less" multipart paper/forms that were
       | economical for low-volume business use.
       | 
       | Most common I recall: 8.5x11" blank tractor-fed computer paper,
       | two layers of paper, "invisible" perforations for tearing away
       | the tractor hole parts from the sides, which also held together 2
       | sheets of paper with with a coating that transferred impact to
       | the front sheet to also mark the rear one. Could be used with
       | even an inexpensive 9-pin home-grade printer.
       | 
       | But shortly after you got computers in the loop, unless the
       | business process really needed multiple copies of paper coming
       | out at the same time, it was probably better to just use the
       | flexibility of the computer. Example: if you're printing an
       | invoice for a customer, from the computer, you can access that
       | data and reproduce that invoice at any time, so don't need to
       | generate more paper waste and handling cost with more expensive
       | carbon/carbonless forms.
       | 
       | Computers were phased into business processes, even when
       | everywhere used a computer to some extent, which extended the
       | life of carbon paper. When I worked as a young teen for a
       | computer retailer&wholesaler, the polymath owner whipped up a
       | bespoke multi-user system for invoices/quotes, inventory
       | tracking, and customer database, which ran on a Seattle Computer
       | Gazelle. But we shipped several UPS packages a day, which wasn't
       | volume enough to justify computer integration with UPS. So, every
       | day, I did the shipping packing and paperwork (precious time away
       | from sales floor commissions), and I had to painstakingly hand-
       | write all the info (address, COD, insurance, etc.). Into the tiny
       | little lines of a page of the book, pressing hard enough to get a
       | legible carbon copy that we'd retain. I'd also have to hand-write
       | any additional stick-on forms (COD, overnight, insurance maybe,
       | etc.), and then tear off the top carbon sheet from the book, and
       | hand it to the UPS driver when they arrived. From there, there'd
       | be a mix of computerization and manual paper processes, including
       | part of the Cash On Delivery tag physically being torn off as a
       | record, when the UPS driver received a check from package
       | recipient and handed over the package.
       | 
       | Carbon paper served its purpose at the time, but I'm glad it's
       | all but dead. I still occasionally use paper. For example, last
       | week, to hand over a printout of a confirmation Web page for an
       | in-person event, since the previous time it took them 5 minutes
       | of asking me information and looking it up in their computer. (To
       | show them on my phone instead, I would've had to be sure to have
       | the same information accessible on my phone, and handed over my
       | phone, and it wouldn't be as legible to them, and they'd get
       | their cooties on my phone, if they didn't drop, steal it, or
       | start snooping on it. The paper just got propped agains their
       | keyboard and side of monitor, as they typed in.)
        
       | crq-yml wrote:
       | The specific thing of "copy the imprinted marks" can be
       | constructed by hand by scrubbing the back of ordinary paper with
       | soft graphite, and this is something still done by artists using
       | traditional workflows. It's helpful when working with tracing
       | paper as a way to iterate on a drawing and to copy it over to an
       | unspoiled final surface.
        
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