You kids don't know how easy you've got it.

Bill Gibson explains a idiosyncrasy of his typing, and in the course of doing so writes a description of archaic technology that rivals the best of Robert Heinlein's throwaway paragraphs on the crazy way they did things in the twentieth century:

Much of my earliest typewriting experience had to do with mimeography, a pre-thermocopy form of reproduction once fairly universal in the world's offices. You typed, once, on a waxed paper "stencil", clipped this over a silkscreen device with a moving pad or drum of ink behind it, and your mimeograph ran off (or silkscreened, really) as many copies of your document as you required. Owing to the physical peculiarities of the medium, though, it was unwise to underline too frequently on a mimeograph stencil: the single unbroken line was particularly prone to tear, producing leaks and smudging.

Almost as good is his "Dead Tech backgrounder" on the IBM Selectric.

My God, did they really do that?

Yes, we really did do that. And it was nowhere near as clumsy and peculiar as Bill makes it sound — at least it didn't seem so at the time. And is fussing with mimeo stencils and slipsheeting really any more peculiar than fussing with cascading style sheets?

I have to confess: when I got the spicejar.org server up and running, I felt the same kind of pride of posession that I would have had twenty-five years ago owning a top-of-the-line Gestetner.