ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Fotomat

Fotomat was a little store that you used to see a lot around in neighborhoods in the past. It was like a little booth or kiosk with a big yellow roof, almost like a mini house, that would be located in a shopping plaza or a parking lot. Inside this little store, there was a machine that would develop pictures from cameras.

When people used to take pictures with their cameras in the past, they would use something called film. Film was like a little strip of plastic that had chemicals on it, which would capture the picture you took. After taking pictures with your camera and finishing the roll of film, you would bring it to the Fotomat store.

Fotomat employees would take your film, put it in the development machine, and make your pictures come to life. The machine would use special chemicals to turn the film into pictures that you could hold in your hand. This process was called developing the film.

After the machine was finished with the developing, the pictures would come out of the machine, and the Fotomat employee would put them in a little envelope for you to take home. That envelope would contain your pictures and your original film, so you could store them somewhere safe or take more pictures with your camera. You would pay for the developing, just like you would pay for anything else you bought at the store.

In conclusion, Fotomat was a little store where you could develop your camera pictures into actual photographs on paper. It was like a modern-day photo printing shop that was common in the past.