[GreenKeys] More on the TTY ribbons?

[Bill]

Just to keep this "thread" going....

On my first ship in the Navy in 1960 as a Radioman, we would tear off 
the TTY copy and type the message onto a multi-page message form. White 
for unclassified, green for confidential and yellow for secret.

You learned early on to type with some skill on the "mill" because typos 
were not excepted. These forms were then routed to the various officers 
and departments and they would take their copies.

Of course, immediate and flash traffic was routed "in the rough" then 
returned to the shack and typed on the forms then re-routed so everyone 
could get their copies.

I think it was my 3rd or 4th ship that we finally got a "copy machine". 
It was a thermal transfer system. You would put the TTY copy inside a 
two part sleeve - the 2 parts being a clear cover and the purple media. 
This would be inserted in to a thermal unit that would shine an intense 
light on it and make an image of the message onto the purple media. We 
would then take the purple sheet off and put it on the "ditto" machine 
and run copies. By the end of your 8 hour watch, you were purple from 
head to toe.

It seemed like the transfer system would only work with a carbon based 
ink or at least something that had some carbon in it. A pencil would 
work but a blue ink pen would not. Or maybe it was just that it needed 
something black.

It was years later that Xerox was integrated into the radio shack. On my 
last ship, the USS Ranger, we had two huge Xerox machines that would 
spit out around 100+ copies a minute each. These ran 24/7. I can't 
remember the model number but I was one of the repairmen on it. Talk 
about using some paper and going thru a lot of drums!

Just thought I would chime in on this.

Bill Cain