Remember when.... comments welcome.... your first servicing days with copiers

[blackcat4866]

Re: Remember when.... comments welcome.... your first servicing days with copiers

I must have been one of those groundbreaking techs. In 1989 I started with the white or blue short sleeve shirts and ties. It didn't take long for me to figure out that the blue shirts lasted longer. Within a few years I had entirely switched over to gray and black shirts.

In the 90's I wore a lot of those cartoon character ties, and some pretty garish colors. I might still have a few ... =^..^=

[KenB]

Re: Remember when.... comments welcome.... your first servicing days with copiers

Remember the paper service log packets?

....and finding a pay-phone to call dispatch?

[KenB]

Re: Remember when.... comments welcome.... your first servicing days with copiers

I used to have a pocket auto dialer that you could hold up to the payphone to enter you long distance carrier number & destination.
=^..^=

Our dispatch system required touch tones.

A lot of my customers only had rotary dial phones, so I used one of those handy dandy pocket dealers every day.

[blackcat4866]

Re: Remember when.... comments welcome.... your first servicing days with copiers

I remember my boss getting a tie caught in a running copier and it sucked him into it. The gal in the office saw it and smart thinking grabbed a scissor to cut it off. Boss was pissed about losing his tie.

I had a Mita DC-152Z bypass take my tie. Fortuitously, I had a pair of wire cutters in my hand, and I hacked off the tie. Funny how fast you can do such things when you're motivated!

The nipped-off tie fed all the way through and landed in the exit tray with the Seldrum Space Shuttle copied onto it. =^..^=

[blackcat4866]

Re: Remember when.... comments welcome.... your first servicing days with copiers

Our dispatch system required touch tones.

A lot of my customers only had rotary dial phones, so I used one of those handy dandy pocket dealers every day.

During my Ikon time, we entered our service call data through the phone keypad, i.e.:
jammed = 10_01_13_13_05_04

A lot of digital phones stopped making tones after ~50 button presses, which comes up surprisingly quickly when you've got to order parts, and enter a 5 line description. The pocket dialer was a life saver. I think it's still around here someplace. =^..^=

[ThisPete]

Re: Remember when.... comments welcome.... your first servicing days with copiers

I must have been one of those groundbreaking techs. In 1989 I started with the white or blue short sleeve shirts and ties. It didn't take long for me to figure out that the blue shirts lasted longer. Within a few years I had entirely switched over to gray and black shirts.

In the 90's I wore a lot of those cartoon character ties, and some pretty garish colors. I might still have a few ... =^..^=

Very guilty of that too, still have mine though..

[Rusty.Harris]

Re: Remember when.... comments welcome.... your first servicing days with copiers

When I started, "way back" in 1981. Most copiers still used liquid, although plain paper was really making headway.
I HATED having to clean out tanks. But, in the midwest, if you were low on gas, the dispersant could get you down
the road to a gas station. Even better in the summer if you had the dispersant already mixed with the ink. Made a
good FOGGER!

Machines back then had basically bicycle chains, switches and a huge cam for the timing. Fax machines were a separate
item, as were dot matrix printers.
Troubleshooting? IF you were lucky, inside the door was a 1-9 counter that you could look up in a book for "some" help,
but troubleshooting was basically mechanical troubleshooting, or pulling jams out. A LONG PM cycle was around 6-7 thousand
copies. Moving tops. Then came "finishers". I remember the first one I saw (Sharp) was a 20 bin finisher, that was about 7 feet
tall, weight more than the copier, had a tray arm to reach the copier output (Sharp SF-811), and you really didn't want to be
in the same room when it was on, because of how loud it was.
You had a box full of manuals, that really didn't help you a lot, but was one of the reasons your service vehicle was either a pickup
truck with a camper shell, or, a full size fan, so you could pick up and move machines around, on what looked like a "body cart".
Copy quality? If it came out of the machine, without lines or streaks, and you could read it, it was "good enough".

Now, everything is networked, machines are MFP's. Copies look better than the original, most of the issues I have these days are
network issues or SOFTWARE issues.


I remember when the paperwork reduction act came along, mid 80's, someone told me I'd be without a job soon.
I just laughed. I said as long as there are politicians & lawyers, there WILL be paperwork. When computer & the internet came
along, it just exploded.

[slimslob]

Re: Remember when.... comments welcome.... your first servicing days with copiers

When I started, "way back" in 1981. Most copiers still used liquid, although plain paper was really making headway.
I HATED having to clean out tanks. But, in the midwest, if you were low on gas, the dispersant could get you down
the road to a gas station. Even better in the summer if you had the dispersant already mixed with the ink. Made a
good FOGGER!

Also made good charcoal lighting fluid and weed killer.

Machines back then had basically bicycle chains, switches and a huge cam for the timing. Fax machines were a separate
item, as were dot matrix printers.
Troubleshooting? IF you were lucky, inside the door was a 1-9 counter that you could look up in a book for "some" help,
but troubleshooting was basically mechanical troubleshooting, or pulling jams out. A LONG PM cycle was around 6-7 thousand
copies. Moving tops. Then came "finishers". I remember the first one I saw (Sharp) was a 20 bin finisher, that was about 7 feet
tall, weight more than the copier, had a tray arm to reach the copier output (Sharp SF-811), and you really didn't want to be
in the same room when it was on, because of how loud it was.

Probably made by Gradco. They were one of the first to make add-on sorters. Had an arm the arrached to the copier exit and caught the copies as they exited.

You had a box full of manuals, that really didn't help you a lot, but was one of the reasons your service vehicle was either a pickup
truck with a camper shell, or, a full size fan, so you could pick up and move machines around, on what looked like a "body cart".
Copy quality? If it came out of the machine, without lines or streaks, and you could read it, it was "good enough".

Now, everything is networked, machines are MFP's. Copies look better than the original, most of the issues I have these days are
network issues or SOFTWARE issues.


I remember when the paperwork reduction act came along, mid 80's, someone told me I'd be without a job soon.
I just laughed. I said as long as there are politicians & lawyers, there WILL be paperwork. When computer & the internet came
along, it just exploded.

I remember the paper reduction act. I worked on dictation systems in most of the local hospitals. The hospitals start having to scan all their old patient records to electronic storage. Patient record files were removed from the nursing stations. So instead of there being a patient record for doctors, nurses, medical technicians, etc, they had to print one every time someone needed to visit a patient and when the returned to the nursing station, chuck it in the shredding bin. That could be a hundred or sheets of paper per patient per day sent to shredding.

[tonerhead]

Re: Remember when.... comments welcome.... your first servicing days with copiers

Remember the deli slicer (cheese cutter) copiers. Operators got upset about registration issues on long runs. I handed out more than one bulletin from the manufacturer direct to the customer saying for long runs they were to tape the original to the platen glass to prevent movement. I remember one cheese cutter had a doc feed built onto it. Talk about having too much saki for the engineers that came up with that idea. I remember a Toshie that had a manual duplex. The first side went into an internal holding area and would stack about 25. Then you would reload into the paper tray and send it through for the second pass to the exit tray. Good times.

One of the oddest copiers I have ever seen were the "book copiers" We sold these to a lot of libraries. I forget the manufacturer, but they were Panasonic engines. The scanner area was totally redone. The right side of the scan glass was against a 45 degree drop on the right side of the machine. This was so books could be scanned without wrecking the binding and there would be no book bind shadow in the middle. It actually worked well. It was up to ledger size paper. For ledger sized paper the scanner would start where they start today on far left. For letter sized paper, the scanner would start in the middle of the glass and scan to the right side end of glass. If a library patron wanted a regular copy, they would put their original on the far right side of glass.

[slimslob]

Re: Remember when.... comments welcome.... your first servicing days with copiers

Remember the deli slicer (cheese cutter) copiers. Operators got upset about registration issues on long runs. I handed out more than one bulletin from the manufacturer direct to the customer saying for long runs they were to tape the original to the platen glass to prevent movement. I remember one cheese cutter had a doc feed built onto it. Talk about having too much saki for the engineers that came up with that idea. I remember a Toshie that had a manual duplex. The first side went into an internal holding area and would stack about 25. Then you would reload into the paper tray and send it through for the second pass to the exit tray. Good times.

One of the oddest copiers I have ever seen were the "book copiers" We sold these to a lot of libraries. I forget the manufacturer, but they were Panasonic engines. The scanner area was totally redone. The right side of the scan glass was against a 45 degree drop on the right side of the machine. This was so books could be scanned without wrecking the binding and there would be no book bind shadow in the middle. It actually worked well. It was up to ledger size paper. For ledger sized paper the scanner would start where they start today on far left. For letter sized paper, the scanner would start in the middle of the glass and scan to the right side end of glass. If a library patron wanted a regular copy, they would put their original on the far right side of glass.

Apeco used to have a model that had telephone type rotary dial to use for setting the number of copies you wanted. Technicians called it the dial-a-jam.