More ‘Fichin’

If you ever feel like traveling back in time, go to the library and scan through a microfiche reel containing issues of 1960s Time magazines (serendipitous pun!). I did a bit of that this afternoon for the professor I am working for. Not only does the magazine itself generate anachronistic ambience, but the machine is straight from a nearly expired era. All its parts are giant and clunky, and the deteriorating grey plastic looks like it was skinned from my family’s first Apple IIe. It doesn’t even have a digital display. Instead, if anything goes awry, a red light with a funny icon lights up. After a few of these error messages blinked at me, signaling yet another delay in my attempt to make barely legible copies of a seriously out-of-date mag, I realized the icon is a symbolic representation of a sheet of paper moving through a series of rollers in the printing mechanism. That is, there is a paper jam and you have to disembowel the dinosaur and prod it back into functionality. I wonder how long it will take librarians to get an electronic version of all those old archives. Until then, it’s kind of fun to do it the old fashioned way.

[Image from: http://www.gl.iit.edu/govdocs/micro/micro.html]