Photocopying is

rather different these days.
Do you remember those enormous machines which worked very slowly and kept on jamming? There was a machine in the basement of the building I worked in at the university in London. My little "office" was next door to it. I would hear the thumps and bangs and occasional swear words as people tried to get it to work. Sometimes a face would appear around my door and someone would say,
    "Cat, do you know anything about..." or "Cat, can you get the wretched thing to work?"
I would go in and look. It wasn't because I believed I would be any more successful than the person who asked. It was simply because I sympathised. I wanted to give moral support. Once or twice I even managed to pull out a piece of paper which had jammed. 
I knew how to load paper into the machine - and do it the right way up too. If you didn't do that then the machine would sulk. They were temperamental things.
The copying was only in black and white of course. We still thought it was pretty good. It meant I only had to type my first thesis once. Photocopies of the required copies were acceptable - and they hid a mass of correction tape.
All this had to be done page by page from the original document.  You had to get the piece of paper you were copying lined up straight on the screen and close the lid and....hope for the best.
We moved on to photocopiers that could do colour printing. I never had much to do with those. 
Libraries put photocopiers in. Our local library now had three machines. You can scan anything in up to A3 size and print it off.  There were dire warnings about copyright. Sadly people seem to think that copying anything in any amount is acceptable. It isn't but I doubt it will change. 
You can copy at home. You can even print in colour at home. I have never ventured into colour printing at home. The printer attached to this computer chugs along in simple black and white.
But I needed something a bit more than that.
I went off to the big stationery business a few train stops away. I prowled in and lined up behind the people waiting. When it came to my turn I handed over  what I wanted copied.
    "Be about ten minutes. I think. There's still a big job ahead of you," the boy told me.
    "Can you bind it as well?" I asked, "I think the margins are big enough."
    "Sure thing."
Eight minutes later he waved me over again. He passed me over a copy of my recent thesis - the one I never intended to write. It was on better paper than I have  here at home. It was bound in simple comb binding. The front page has the university logo in colour. There is clear plastic cover over the top. It cost me about a fifth of what it once would, if that.
And with it he handed back a USB that had all the information the machine had needed to give me the hard copy.  I really do like modern technology when it means I don't need to carry vast quantities of paper around and feed them slowly into a machine one by one.