Purple is from a Ditto machine. These used carbon, and the ditto master had the document image reversed. You wrote or typed on the front and the sheet with the carbon created the reverse master on the rear. Copy paper was dampened with a solvent that dissolved the top layer. A mimeograph used a waxy stencil that you wrote or typed on. I believe you could get 10,000 images from a mimeograph. If it was something you might want to reuse, you could blot it between sheets of newspaper. The ink color was normally black, and was not easily changed.

A few years ago, I was talking to a young person about the USSR, and how copiers and mimeographs were illegal there, and there were very serious penalties for possessing them. I then had to explain what a mimeograph was.

I cannot contain my delight at seeing that so many of my cohort were called to defend the humble but purple ditto. In more or less fifty years of teaching, I never saw a purple mimeo. Purple cows another matter.

As a retired teacher I used many different types of print duplicating processes over the years. In general, purple copies came from spirit duplicators, the most common brand was Ditto. The fumes in the teachers’ workroom before school could knock your socks off. Mimeograph machines usually printed black.

Mimeograph - love it. How about cutting a stencil, LOL!

Mimeograph could be any color, since the mimeograph stencil had the characters cut out, with ink sent through them, but was generally used with black ink. B.D. may be thinking of a hectograph, better known in the day by the trademark Rexograph, with purple ink in each "stencil" (a misnomer because it didn't have holes in it).

I think the one that used purple ink was a spirit duplicator, aka Ditto, way cheaper and easier then mimeograph. When I was at Walden West U, I fed my eating habit by printing school posters on a Showcard press, bars of metal type that I rolled ink onto. The first word processors were still ten years off. Aah, the times we've lived through. Sort of exactly the same as Mike's. 

Loving the thought of Gen Y and Gen Z spending part of today googling "mimeograph." Memories of the colour and the smell.

Could you please post the back cover of #SAD! : Doonesbury in the Time of Trump? It had Trump complaining about Doonesbury. Thanks a lot!

Re Sunday's "Jimmy Crow here!" strip: Crows don't have yellow beaks. Other than the white-billed crow of the Soloman Islands, crows' beaks range from charcoal to black in color. (Cartoons have been getting it wrong for decades, so don't feel too bad.)

Thank you for calling attention to the importance of pre-college courses in the recent Classic Doonesbury storyline. Dealing with entering students who do not have colege-level basic skills is becoming an increasingly critical problem. I'm a Professor Emeritus of English at Ivy Tech State College in Indianapolis. For almost twenty years I headed our school's developmental education program. Remediation assumes there is something wrong with these students and attempts to remediate or fix them. Developmental education assumes that there is ability in the students that can be developed. We've had much greater success and happier students and faculty since switching to the developmental approach. You can read more about it at the National Organization for Student Success website.

Your drawings of Trump are spot on, but are missing his white eyes and lids -- resulting from his goggled sessions in the tanning booth.

I keep staring at the portrait in the last panel of today's strip, and wonder: What does that expression convey? Shock? Dismay? Indifference? It sure doesn't look happy. 

I loved the Doonesbury Crossword! It was just what I needed right now. 

Love Ross' puzzle! Uplifting and fun. Hope we see more (thanks for Andy!) and get to work them "in the paper."

Today's strip is freakishly prescient.

I don't understand how you keep doing that. Are you psychic?

Roland's June 19th tweets remind us how amazing you have been and continue to be. Our storyteller for 50 years!

Today's strip sums him up perfectly. If only it were an ironic exaggeration.

Regarding Roland's tweet and the Trump-Pence Team's Darwin Awards nomination, I can only quote the great author of libertarian science fiction, Larry Niven: "Think of it as evolution in action."