Flashback Friday: Copiers The Size Of Small Cars
At one time copiers were considered the height of office technology. You couldn’t go into any office without there being a huge, clunky machine sitting in the corner, churning out copies with a cacophony of whirling, thumping sounds. And of course the further you go back, the bigger and slower they were, so welcome to the early 1970′s.
This isn’t a dissection of just the 3M 209 copier, but all of the copiers in the early days of the technology’s development. Before the coier there were all those messy methods of using copy paper, memographs and so on. While copiers had their own problems such as liquid toner, using a massive amount of heat to finish the copies and so on, people were thrilled with the concept that you could just push buttons and walk away.
Although we would laugh today at the speed of seven pages per minute (PPM), you actually are finding less and less copiers in the world. You still find them in law firms, doctor’s offices and so on, but your average office doesn’t really have the devices any more unless it’s an all-in-one that is also a scanner and fax machine. While the devices got smaller and smaller, it just got to where it no longer makes sense to have a machine that just made copies. I’m just glad they got down to a size smaller than a scanner before they started to go away.
What say you? Do you find copiers no longer make sense?
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