Don’t Touch Anything!

Don’t Touch Anything!

 By 

Jody Carnes-Hart

For Appaloosa Radio

I have recently retired from my position as the Chief Technology Officer for a large, California State agency. I am now spending much of my time, sharing stories about how technology has impacted us. This is a story from my husband, from a summer job that he had in 1968.

That summer, he worked in the collating room at a company that produced a unique product, the so-called “secret” book of listings that every real estate agent carried with them. My husband’s company had contracted with the various Boards of Realtors across Southern California to produce new books every week. Here’s how it worked. A local board of realtors would type up a 3 by 5 card with all of the particulars of the property’s listing, and then a “photographer” from my husband’s company would pick up the card and then photograph the property using a specially designed Polaroid camera. At the company, the Polaroid  photograph and the card would be photo transferred to a paper ITEK plate and then printed on an offset printing press. Remarkably efficient technology for the time.

In the collating room, the various books would be made up for delivery back to the customers. 

The collating room had a massive machine that could collate nineteen separate pages at a time. Once a “book” had been collated, a worker would drill holes so the pages could be inserted into a binder.