
Typewriters and one very lonely fax
But at the
time, things were different. There was no Internet, there were no mobile
phones, and fax machines were just around the corner. 35 years ago, translation
was done on typewriters writing on tracing paper – we had a few machines in the
office, while freelance translators in those days had to invest in expensive
electric typewriters that cost more than what you pay for a decent laptop
today. Some of the better typewriters had a correction feature where you could
easily “lift off” a typo with correction tape, although it was time consuming.
When electronic typewriters saw the light of day, it was actually possible to
type a full line on a green display, you could then correct typos easily by
stepping back, then print the full line by hitting Enter. What a productivity
boost!
I think we
got our first fax, a Ricoh G3 unit about a year or so later. It was as big as a
fridge, had heavy paper rolls and sticky toner you literally had to pour into a
container in the machine. Handling toner was a dirty job. That first fax sat unproductive for a very long time in the beginning. Since hardly anyone else
had a fax, we had almost no one to communicate with. When we finally did
receive faxes, the black toner somehow got glued to the paper more or less in
the right place, later when the received fax documents got too old, the toner
tended to fall off making the documents close to illegible.
Who needs internet when you have motorcycles!

We continued
to expand from day one, the office still in Sweden Center in the Roppongi
district of Tokyo got bigger, translation volumes increased and the need for
more languages also increased. In the 80’s, technology also started to take
off. To help communication, we witnessed the advent of computers. We invested
in bulky CPM computers with green CRT monitors, but no hard disk drives.
Translation was done using the WordStar word processor application (the spellchecking
feature was a godsend!), data was saved on floppy disks, and soon it became
possible to use acoustic couplers to send data over telephone lines, but the line had to be noise-free.
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An acoustic coupler – everyone had to be quiet for transmission to succeed source: Wikipedia.org |
By the mid
80’s, idioma was indeed a very hi-tech operation and with an acute need for more
translators. That’s when we set up our first office in Europe, but that’s a
story for another time.
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Sanyo MBC-1000 computers had 5” floppy disks to store data source: old-computers.com |
Steen
Carlsson
Managing
Director
idioma sro
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