Does anybody remember typing correction paper?

[HmmmCat]

Does anybody remember using typing correction paper? I think it may have been called snowpake paper. It was like chalky white carbon paper. If you made a mistake typing, you aligned the mistake back in the typing space, slipped a piece of correction paper behind the guide but in front of the mistake, and then hit the same wrong key. If you were lucky, the letters aligned perfectly and you overtyped the incorrect letter in white. Then you could overtype it again with the correct letter. Fiddly, but neater and quicker than painting Tippex a few years later.

Yes, I used it in the 1980s in my early days of office work

I might be remembering it wrong, but I think my mum's electric typewriter at work had a separate reel of the correcting tape, so you could just backspace and use it?

I remember this! I actually had a typing class too. Early 80s. I'm sure I didn't get rid of my own typewriter until mid to late 80s.

How about NCR paper (No Carbon Required - type once, get up to four copies!)

Oh God yes! I had completely forgotten about that!

I also had all the colours of the (liquid) Tip-Pex which matched all the different coloured paper we used.

And I invariably went home covered in the stuff 😄

Yes we had Tippex paper at work. Little tabs of chalky paper that you slipped over the mistake and typed on it.

Tippex! And also Tippex fluid. My dad used to take a great pride in being able to use up every small space on a single sheet of paper

When I started my first job, a gazillion years ago, we had internal memos on yellow paper. You could buy yellow Tippex, but it was never the same shade - always made mistakes even more obvious. I was so relieved when typewriters with self-correcting memories were introduced.

Oh yes! Some of the fancier offices I worked in had this.

Who remembers gestetner machines? Didn't you have to make corrections with wax?

Ive still got several packs of Tippex sheets and bottles of fluid. I’ve also still got a manual typewriter, although I've not used it for some time.

I was the queen of lining it up, tippex and typing over so it barely showed. A skill that only remained useful for about two years of my life.

Yes i used to bugger about with my dads type writers when i was a kid in the 80s. He had 2 in his study, an old one and a REALLY old one (black and gold with keys miles up in the air on stalks which took strength to push down and was noisy as hell! Ker-thunk!!) and i loved messing with the correction paper AND the carbon copy paper 😃

Oh yes. And the boss’s PA had a Golfball typewriter, while the typing pool were just delighted theirs were electric! Hand writing drafts for the typists, before promotion to a dictaphone.

The days of microfiche, the Evening Standard was full of jobs for Key Punch Operators, the branch office’s single computer had its own room and was the size of a small car!

Yes, my Mum was very skilled with it.

She typed my Music A-level dissertation in 1991, bless her!

Who remembers the TVs that looked like astronaut helmets? I thought they were so cool!

I still have some, it came tucked in the accessories pocket of one of my typewriters along with the original purchase receipt 💙 tried using one and it just flakes off now but was a good memory!

Yes - wax stencils and if you made a mistake you had to use special fluid to type over it. They printed out in purple (or was that just where I worked).

And Telex machines!

I remember Telex machines well, used them in my first two jobs. I used to type a ships manifest for transmission back in the late 70s. That was some job too!

Yes. I remember typing correction paper and I remember electric typewriters with a correction reel.

OMG yes. They were so messy and fiddly.

In my secondary school we used to sometimes get sheets that had been Gestetner-copied. Especially in Geography IIRC. They were indeed purple. It was a great privilege to be called into the office to crank the machine. How they managed to turn a boring physical job into one the pupils would give anything to do! Very Tom Sawyer 🤣

I still use a typewriter every day (A Royal F.P.) and still use it, Tipp Ex make it, small squares of white coated paper with a chalk texture.
You backspace, place the square between the ribbon vibrator and the paper and retype the same letter. Of course if you are doing a carbon its more tricky to correct the carbon as well, but it can be done.
Snowpake, Kores and Liquid Paper are / were other brands of correction paper.

Yes!!! And if you made a mistake it was a skill to line up the dots on the tape and kind of redo it. If the tape got very long you had to watch someone accidentally treading on it!

I had an IBM golfball - best and fastest typewriter there was. I really resisted it being taken off me for some kind of machine with a little screen.

They were an innovation - with a 'golfball' with the printing heads on (can't remember the proper name). Before them you had to use little slips of correction paper.