Just a step, from innovation to obsolescence

My first attempt to get a degree, in the early 1970s, wasn’t an edifying picture of progress through study. But it wasn’t entirely without educational value. It’s just it wasn’t the value that had been planned for the course I was supposed to be following, but wasn’t, as I invested my efforts elsewhere.

The institution kind enough to tolerate my presence for a few years back then was King’s College, London. One of the best ventures I engaged in while there was the publication for a little while of a satirical journal. It gave a slightly radical, highly irreverent and self-consciously humorous take on events in the college.

It was called ‘Something’. As in ‘something is stirring in King’s’. Ingenious, right? Well, amusing to students, at least.

Our best headline ever referred to one of my fellow students as a ‘debutante whore’. She took it well, as it happened – I think there was a certain cachet in appearing in the paper for as long as it lasted – but I certainly would not use such a term for any woman today. To be honest, I wouldn’t have used it then either: it was a typo. I’d been typing the beginning of a sentence, ‘the debutante whose…’, and hit an ‘r’ instead of an ‘s’.

Something’s best writer was a student with a splendidy biting pen. I wish I could remember his name. When he saw what I’d written, he exclaimed, ‘Oh, that’s good! Excellent’. I hadn’t the heart to admit that I’d simply made an error – praise from him was invaluable – so I let it stand.

A typo. An error while typing. For these were the days when we still typed text. On actual typewriters. And the typewriters we used weren’t even the fancy IBM ones with a golfball onto which the letters had been cast, where a mere touch of a key on the electric keyboard drove the letter powerfully onto the page. No, these were the old ones, where the power with which you hit the key determined the firmness of the impression on the paper.

And hitting them hard mattered. Because we weren’t typing onto paper but onto what we called ‘skins’ though the proper term was ‘stencils’. You had to keep the typewriter ribbon – which carried the ink – out of the way so that the keys, unpadded, hit the skin directly and cut the shape of the letter into it. What you ended up with was a foolscap stencil – a bit bigger than A4 which hadn’t yet been introduced in England – with letter-shaped holes cut into it. We’d then load it onto a machine which drove ink through it onto a page. Or rather, several hundred pages.

In other words, it was a duplicator, a quick and cheap way of producing a large number of copies of a single document, before photocopiers were available.

A Gestetner machine with skin in place and ready to duplicate

It was a cheap process but not free. Though it was free to us, only because we impudently helped ourselves to the college’s stencils, ink and paper, and with no authority whatever used their duplicators – one each, from the two great companies that produced them, Roneo and Gestetner. I later discovered that the college principal, Sir John Hackett, scholar and soldier, found Something quite amusing and had told the authorities not to stop us abusing their generosity, as long as we stayed within reasonable limits.

What’s the point of this story?

Well, within a few years, photocopiers appeared in every office and, indeed, college and the idea of typing onto skins and running sheets of paper through a duplicator went completely out of fashion. Roneo was bought by Vickers Engineering and then Alcatel in France; Gestetner was taken over by Ricoh from Japan. Duplicators are now museum pieces.

A few years later, having a little mended my ways and actually got a degree (in a different subject and at a different college), I found myself working in the field which is still mine 35 years later: information services for healthcare. And quite soon I was putting up a business case to my superiors to buy a fax machine. More and more NHS organisations were using them and, rather than wait for us to get documents to them by post, they regularly asked us to fax them through.

It was a battle, but the pressure was growing, measured above all by people using commercial fax services and charging the company for them. Before long we had our first fax machine. It was exciting: we were at the cutting edge of technology, a bit like when I first learned to use a duplicator.

And why do I tell that story? Because earlier this week I saw a newspaper article – that is, an article I read on line but on a newpaper’s website, though it wasn’t actually printed on news-paper – announcing that the NHS was phasing out its fax machines. I saw the technology introduced, now I’m watching it go again.

Some years after the campaign for faxes, I was working for another company which was resisting the generalised use of laptop computers. The cost of equipping all the staff was just too high. But, grudgingly and with bad grace,  eventually the pressure was too high and we were all issued with laptops. The same sort of story as with the fax machines a decade earlier.

Today, turn up in a new job and the first thing that happens is that you’re issued with a laptop computer. A phone as well, as it happens – but I don’t have the space here to go into that innovation too.

There was a time, in the middle ages, when children could learn their trade from their parents. Tools had changed so little between generations that the skills were still good. Technology outlived its users. Not today. Within my own career, I've seen a technology appear, be superseded, and vanish again.

Will the same happen to my laptop? Am I already witnessing its decline into the mists of history that have swallowed the Roneo and Gestetner duplicator, and the NHS fax machine? Who knows?

Exciting times. If Something still existed, I could have written a story on the subject.