this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2026
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I'm old. When our teacher brought copies to class we would all smell them. What was that called?

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[โ€“] solrize@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Mimeos worked differently and didn't smell nearly as strong, but they needed special paper ("twilltone" in the fanzine world) and the stencils and machines were more expensive than their ditto counterparts. You'd use them for large copy runs since a stencil could run off unlimited copies. Ditto masters were basically carbon paper and were good for maybe 30-50 copies depending. About right for a batch of class handouts. Dittos were also relatively clean and convenient to operate. Using a mimeo generally made a mess.

https://fancyclopedia.org/index.php?title=Twil-tone

This is also good: https://fancyclopedia.org/wiki/Mimeo