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Xerox Corporation
The roots of Xerox Corporation and its history of innovation started growing back in 1938. In October of that year, patent attorney Chester Carlson (1906–1968) invented the first xerographic image. Carlson believed that the world needed an easier and cheaper way to make copies of important documents. Previously, carbon paper, printing presses, or retyping were required to create a document copy.
However, it took nearly ten long years before Carlson could find a company that would develop his invention into a useful product. The Haloid Company, a small photo-paper maker in Rochester, New York, took on the challenge and promise of xerography. In 1949 Haloid introduced its first xerographic machine. Slow and messy, it required several steps to produce a decent copy—but it worked.
Birth of the Office Copier
Not until 1959, twenty-one years after Carlson invented xerography, was the first convenient plain-paper office copier unveiled. By that time, Haloid had changed its name to Haloid Xerox Inc. The Xerox 914 copier—so named because it could copy pages up to nine by fourteen inches—could make copies quickly at the touch of a button. It was a phenomenal success! By 1962, some 10,000 copiers had been shipped. By 1963, Xerox Corporation
had dropped the "Haloid" and had grown to a $22.5 million company, up from $2 million just four years earlier.
Xerox Corporation's inventive researchers and engineers went on to develop hundreds of industry-leading hardware and software products after the Xerox 914. By 2000 Xerox had become a $19 billion company selling document management equipment at almost every price and speed, including color and black-and-white digital copiers, network printers, fax machines, multifunction devices, and software.
That first plain-paper office copier truly revolutionized the office—not only replacing carbon paper but also changing the way people used documents to communicate. Xerox's growing body of knowledge about office processes, as well as expertise in engineering, manufacturing, and technology, made Xerox the perfect breeding ground for new ideas about how to make the office—and office workers—operate better.
From Copiers to Computers
In 1970 Xerox gathered a team of world-class researchers to study the way that information was created, transported, and shared. Their mission was to create "the architecture of information." The scientists of the new Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in Palo Alto, California, were encouraged to dream, invent, and discover, as well as to push the outer limits of current technology. At the time, computers were still room-sized devices that only the most expert computer programmers could manage. But the PARC scientists' vision was to create simpler computers that could help people work together even more powerfully than a copier could.
By 1973 pioneering PARC researchers had changed the course of the computer industry and developed the world's first personal computer, known as the Alto. The Alto embodied several PARC innovations, including a graphical user interface (GUI), what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editing, overlapping "windows," and the first commercial mouse, so users could point-and-click their way through tasks. All of these features are standard components in Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows-based personal computers today.
PARC scientists also recognized a far more powerful role for computers to play. They networked, or connected, Altos via another PARC invention, the Ethernet, to further enhance people's ability to interact. Ethernet ultimately became a global standard for interconnecting computers on local area networks.
PARC also invented the laser printer, which was a natural extension of Xerox's expertise in putting marks onto paper. Laser printers allowed users of the Alto—and users of its successor, the Star, launched commercially in 1981—to simplify putting an exact copy of what they saw on their computer screens onto paper.
These, and dozens of other pioneering technologies from PARC, fundamentally changed the office—and the world. Xerox did not fully commercialize its personal computer technologies because at the time, the corporation remained focused on the core business from which it started: copiers. Instead, companies such as Apple Computer, Microsoft, and other Silicon Valley start-ups visited Xerox PARC's labs, licensed or replicated the technologies, and applied them to their own products and businesses.
Xerox's innovation continues through its research centers today, and PARC is widely regarded as one of the top corporate research facilities in the world. PARC scientists aggressively create new ways to manage electronic documents, inventing better tools for tapping the resources of the World Wide Web, building knowledge into smart matter, and researching how people create and manage electronic and paper information. Although the personal computer revolution is largely past, Xerox PARC remains part of the continuing evolution of computing technology for the future.
Bibliography
Brown, John Seely, and Paul Duguid. The Social Life of Information. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000.
Kearns, David T., and David A. Nadler. Prophets in the Dark. New York: Harper-Collins, 1992.
Smith, Douglas K., and Robert C. Alexander. Fumbling the Future. New York: William Morrow, 1988.
Xerox Corporation
Copyright © 2002 by Macmillan Reference USA, an imprint of the Gale Group
All rights reserved
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