Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Tools of yesteryear

An art director friend must have been cleaning out drawers, as he sent a picture of the following artifact. I wonder how many of you know what it is?

Clue: He says that it was much slimmer than an iPad,  it was being given away for free 25 years ago and he never had any problems with its software.

5 Comments:

Anonymous Kat said...

Is it an eye chart?

Kidding. I assume it's for measuring text sizes? Back before computers did that for us? (The dark ages were a scary time, no?)

1:52 pm  
Anonymous Kim said...

Hilarious.

Boy do I feel old all of a sudden.

2:25 pm  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Well the thing (whatever it is) has a URL on it, so it couldn’t be more than 20 or so years old, likely much less.

12:22 am  
Anonymous Joe Clark said...

It’s a pica rule. I bought one for £2 in London a while back.

1:05 am  
Blogger D. B. Scott said...

Good point about the URL, which really started about 1992. Which, in a sense, makes it even more amusing that such an ubiquitous tool has become a buggy whip in such a relatively short time.

I have a little acetate overlay that I used in the 1970s which helped count the number of words on a typewritten page, in pica or elite. Can you imagine?

10:17 am  

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