I think I remember twin tubs. Americans still have them, but they don't trust front loaders (honestly, for all their gun-toting, constitutionalizing, bad-assery they run off if you show them a front-loader).
Most Americans will recognize microfiche machines though, they're still a staple of movies, where they go to the local newspaper and scroll through historical copies to find out that, yes, the murders happened every 30 years. We don't do that in the UK, because our local newspapers are crap and don't really have the traditional status of US ones (before the internet, even the smallest burg would have had its own local newspaper), and rather than murders or spooky events, it'd be random outbreaks of sheep buggery and someone pissing in the Coop.
In other matters, in the early 2000s, I remember buying a massive industrial fax machine at the behest of my employers, because we had to send marked-up copies of proofs to our super-new offshore operations (everyone in the UK, you're fired! prophetic considering they made me redundant a few years later) – the internet was nowhere good enough to scan and send even low-res copies*. Then I had to go to Chennai to babysit the receiving machine (it seems we didn't trust them). Worked pretty well, that was my first proper 'publishing technology' project. From little acorns come big squirrels.
*was chatting to someone the other day, they have a fancy new high-resolution light-sheet fluorescence microscope, each image slice it takes is ~6 terabytes, and it does thousands. I hate to think how much data something like CERN kicks out – the internet says 90 petabytes per year).