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Chicago Tribune Phil Rosenthal column [Chicago Tribune]
[September 14, 2014]

Chicago Tribune Phil Rosenthal column [Chicago Tribune]


(Chicago Tribune (IL) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Sept. 13--As high-tech devices go, the folks at Apple and the rest have yet to introduce anything quite as hot as the one first shown to the public in a televised demonstration 55 years ago this week.



The Xerox 914, the first of what we would come to know as the modern office plain-paper photocopier, changed the world in ways large and small. Two were on site for the big TV presentation at New York's Sherry-Netherland hotel and, it's said, one caught fire.

Jammed paper overheating was a problem common enough that fire extinguishers -- the Xerox marketing department insisted on dubbing them "scorch eliminators" -- became standard issue with the early units. But the copiers moved briskly, just the same, touching many aspects of everyday life in their wake.


The Xerox 914 is part of an innovation chain that runs through Apple Watch and myriad other high-tech products put before the public with as much fanfare as can be mustered. Like so many of those newer gadgets, the Xerox 914 liberated content and empowered its users.

It's not clear that the first September 1959 demonstration gave any real hint of how popular, how prevalent and how much a catalyst for disruption it would be.

Also supposedly not clear, on TV anyway, was the copy the 914 produced, though it's tough to know for sure because there doesn't seem to be a lot of news coverage of the event to check. There's not even agreement on the actual date, with several sources suggesting the anniversary will be Tuesday while Xerox itself pins the date as Friday.

Undisputed, as thousands of clients soon saw, is that the machines could in fact churn out near identical copies on whatever kind of paper a user wanted more quickly, cleanly and easily than anything before it.

The first 914 sold, bulky and tipping the scales at 648 pounds, and was delivered and uncrated in March 1960. The last would roll off the production line in 1976, and the pioneering model would be enshrined in the Smithsonian Institution nine years after that.

Fortune would call the Xerox 914 "the most successful product ever marketed in America." Its impact can be seen in everything from pop art to office clutter.

If authors and publishers worry today about the ability of individuals to collect, aggregate and redistribute proprietary material, that concern began to coalesce with the introduction of the Xerox 914.

"Xerography is bringing a reign of terror into the world of publishing, because it means that every reader can become both author and publisher," Marshall McLuhan wrote in a 1966 edition of "American Scholar." At the time of the Xerox 914's star turn at the Sherry-Netherland, there were other copiers on the market from companies such as 3M, Kodak and even Xerox, many smaller and less expensive. But they required special paper and special handling. Copies came out wet, weren't necessarily permanent and not all shades necessarily registered in reproduction.

Carbon paper was a copying option, and so was retyping a document. But here was an easier way.

But copies only got Xerox so far, and therein is a lesson.

Much was expected of Xerox when the 914 was driving exponential growth in sales. Part of that problem was its success was so rapid, the company had its hands full satisfying demand for what it already did. And so it put out new models of copiers.

But other companies, both in the United States and abroad, would develop their own copiers in time, and while Xerox expanded into far-flung businesses such as insurance, its computer efforts floundered.

The company's famed Palo Alto Research Center, known as PARC in Silicon Valley lore, was established in anticipation of a day when people would look at screens rather than paper and was responsible for some truly remarkable technological breakthroughs. Unfortunately for Xerox, many of those advances and the people responsible for them would prove more valued at Microsoft, IBM, Apple and other companies.

"By 1974, we offered Xerox a real glimpse of the 1980s, and they turned it down," venerated PARC alum Alan Kay told The New York Times in 1984, observing that "PARC had more than 50 of the best people in the world, but Xerox blew it and there aren't many left." The PARC team developed the Xerox Alto, a forward-thinking 1973 desktop personal computer prototype that the company never took to market. The Alto linked through a network to other personal computers, and what was seen on its screen was precisely what was printed out.

The Times reported software developed at PARC enabled "computer terminal display that provides 'windows' for viewing more than one piece of work on a single screen." (Yes, "windows.") But what struck 24-year-old Steve Jobs when he was invited to visit PARC in 1979 was something called graphic-user interface. That's what enables users to point and click on an on-screen icon, and in this case, it was directed by what's known as a mouse.

"I thought it was the best thing I'd seen in my life," Jobs said in PBS' "Triumph of the Nerds." "They'd done a bunch of things wrong. But we didn't know that at the time. But still the germ of the idea was there and they'd done it very well and within 10 minutes it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this." Xerox corporate bosses -- "Toner Heads" to the crew at PARC -- were so focused on the copier sales and marketing that they lost sight of the product development and innovation that gave the company the 914 in the first place.

"Product people get driven out of decision-making forums," Jobs said. "So the product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product vs. a bad product.

"These Toner Heads would come out to Xerox PARC and have no clue what they were seeing," he said. "They just grabbed defeat from the greatest victory in the computer industry. Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry. ...It could have been the IBM of the '90s. It could have been the Microsoft of the '90s. But that's all ancient history. It doesn't really matter anymore." Except as a reminder that even the hottest things grow cold. No matter how good the copies, what's original matters more.

[email protected] Twitter @phil_rosenthal ___ (c)2014 Chicago Tribune Visit the Chicago Tribune at www.chicagotribune.com Distributed by MCT Information Services

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