Ditto / Mimeograph Machines

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I don't know what the model is but it was all black and had keyboard type buttons for controls, and it played backwards. Those replaced the funky old B&H's and Kodaks that the school had before.
 
Deeptub, do you recall if the Eiki 16mm projectors in which the film fluttered through its path were turquoise blue in color? If so, they may have been the older RT series. On the NT series (black case), the claw and shoe retracted during threading and the film (usually) passed through without any drama, assuming the end was trimmed properly. Also, like the Hell and Bowells, you pushed one lever to engage automatic threading, then tugged on the end of the film to disengage the mechanism once the film passed through. The rewind lever is the only other lever on the Eiki, and would have to be up to thread and run film. The only projectors I've worked with that have thread/operate levers are Graflex (later Singer and Telex) and the B&H 1580 and 2580 slot-loaders.

FWIW, the next (and last) Eiki 16mm series was the SNT & SSL. No Eiki Vista 16mm in the future. :-)
 
I seem to remember those copies feeling kind of wet, cold, and slimey. I don't know about sniffing them, though.
 
zzzzz, you're right--I remember now, the rewind lever. Of course, it would always be left in the rewind position, so one would have to flip it back before one could load. That must be why I remembered it as an auto threading lever. We did have one older turquoise Eiki in jr. high--EIKI SOUND the case said--I must be projecting the fluttering from it onto the black NTs (no pun intended). :)

T.
 
One thing about the Eiki NTs, Deeptub, is that on the early (circa 1979-81) models you had to flip the rewind lever down and then turn the motor on, just like the RTs. Around 1982 Eiki added a microswitch that turned on the motor whenever the rewind lever was flipped down, which put an end to the issue of leaving the rewind lever down because lifting the lever turned the motor off.

It also put an end to the one potentially confusing aspect of those old Eikis...to rewind, you put the motor on "forward". Go figure...
 
I've got some old cartoon reels and a Bell & Howell 1552 projector to run them in. It's sort of a cantankerous auto-loader, but once the film's threaded up, it runs pretty good. I remember the old Singer projectors the school had. The picture would jump and flip constantly in those things!

One of the most laughable things I remember are the films that didn't have a soundtrack, but instead had a record or tape to go with them. You'd get the 5-4-3-2-1 countdown at the beginning to get ready to press "play". Invaribly, halfway through the film, the sound would get out of sync, and it would look totally screwy with the people's lips not matching the sound. Most of these however were narrated films, where it didn't matter if the picture got a little off though.

...speaking of old school house AV gear, any of you all have the old Califone record players in your classrooms? I've got an old model 10 here. It was one like I had in school. Grey case, and a wire mesh speaker grill out front. The knobs are on top the speaker grill, and a big 6x9 speaker is in there. I though those were the best sounding turntables when I was young...they really aren't that bad, even though they won't hold a candle to a good HiFi system! Newer stereo Califone turntables were blue, and the speakers were the cover...they attached to the top to cover the turntable portion.
 
We had bouncy Newcomb record players in our schools--all of them were faux woodgrain with baby poo yellow speaker grilles. I was completely fascinated by them, but in retrospect I can't figure out why.

We also had 3M/Wollensak cassette players that seemed quite overengineered for their task. And about a 50/50 mix of new DuKane 500 and ancient Viewlex army tank-style filmstrip projectors. 3M overhead projectors and one old, old Buhl opaque projector.

I also remember a Viewlex 16mm projector in the school we had 1st and 2nd grade in. It seemed fairly new at the time (1979ish) and as I recall it had dimly illuminated pushbuttons and required inserting a frame of sorts for the self-threading and then pulling it back out after it was threaded. Did any 16mm projector require this? This is a very distant and quite possibly corrupted memory, of course.

Zzzzz--our Eiki NTs must have all been the early version--I well recall turning the knob to Forward to rewind...and even as a pre-teen thinking it was quite idiotic. I remember also thinking that the unmarked pilot light seemed a little crude and out-of-place on an otherwise sleek looking machine.

T.
 
School AV

In elementary school (76-80) we had HE, Califone, and Audiotronics record players. My most wonderful memories of music class was the teacher playing different types of world music for us on the dual speaker Califone. This was of course the model with the floating headshell and great sounding speakers. The Audiotronics and HE units didn't sound too great, they sounded rather tinny.

For projectors we had an army of B&H's and Kodak Pageants. But we had one more thing that propelled us into the future. The big blue JVC 1/4" U-Matic VTR! I remember watching ABC Afterschool Specials in class... Stoned and Hewitt's Just Different (which featured a FUNKY ASS soundtrack by the way). Stoned features Scott Baio on drugs.

I was never a fan of overheads but I think ours was 3m.

Filmstrips were run through Viewlex and DuKane. I remember in a reading class, the teacher had a unit made by EDI that rapidly advanced frames while we were supposed to read out loud the words. She also had an Audix projector that used a filmstrip in a cartridge kind of thing. It was automatic with the tape recording and made a kind of snapping sound when it advanced. No beep, no warning, just CLICK! and it's the next frame. I was more interested in the machine that what it was showing.

In middle school (1980-84), VCRs were coming on to the scene. We had a mix of 16mm, U-Matic and VHS. The 16mm projectors were typical B&H, Kodak, and Simplex. The record players were being retired and cassetts were taking over.

In high school (1984-88), good look finding a film or record player at all. VHS and cassettes were the norm.
 
But that's the mystery, it wasn't a motion picture, it was a filmstrip in a little white holder and it would automatically advance along with the tape. I remember the brand being Audix or something like that.

I also remember a weird av thingy made by Hoffman. It had its own screen and it used a 45rpm record and a strip of film (kinda like a GE Show and Tell record/film viewer. You stuck the record into the slot, flipped a lever and watch the show.
 
Charly

Speaking on vintage AV educational stuff, there's the movie "Charly" which was about a mentally challenged person. The real star of the movie was the Seeburg jukebox but there is also a little AV filmstrip thingy that seemed to use some kind of filmstrip and a cassette (or probably an 8 track) tape. A weird kinda movie.
 
Ah yes, those were the good old days. Nuns and students all high on mimeograph fluid fumes. It was second only to the smell of incense at Novena every Friday. I'm guessing everyone got high on that too.
 
jasonl: WE had a Hoffman in our grade school! I thought we were the only ones. Nobody I've met since has ever heard of such a thing. We also had two strange machines that I think were called System 8 or System 80 or something. I think thats what they were called, although that name sounds more like a mainframe computer. You put some sort of long ruler-type thingy that had images on it that were projected sequentially. I think it might have been some sort of interactive contraption. Very strange.
 
Deeptub

YES! That's the one. It looks like a ruler and you stick a 45 in it to make it work.

In middle school I discovered a few similar machines made by Craig and Gould(I think). Yes, the same Craig that made cheap car stereos. They were retired but I plugged them in and played with them hehe.

Again, the 80s killed those funky contraptions with computers. We got an Apple II at school and it was all the rage.
 
8-track cartridge + 16mm film = La Belle Commpak!

The thought of a combination as strange as that got me Googling, and I hit pay dirt (link below).

Also, the RCA and Viewlex "1600" 16mm projectors were the only projectors with a removable automatic threading guide. (RCA introduced the "1600" in the mid-to-late 1960s and later sold the 16mm projector line to Viewlex Audio-Visual sometime in the early 1970s.) I thought it was a great idea as the guide could be removed completely so the projector could be threaded manually. In the numerous times I operated RCA/Viewlex 1600s through high school and college (1977 through around 1983), I don't recall ever using the automatic threading guide once, preferring to thread manually instead.

http://www.8trackheaven.com/compak.html
 
Anybody remember a machine called "Language Master?" It was a machine that used a paper card with a magnetic strip on it. The card had a word on it and on the strip there were two audio tracks. A "read only" track that contained someone pronouncing the word correctly and a "record" track where you pronounced it and played it back. The card would slide through the machine and it would either playback or record depending on how it's set. Of course, being the 4th graders we were, we pronounced several curse words into the thing and played them back, much to the teacher's chagrin.
 
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