On Friday, August 20, 2004, at 03:32 AM, Philip Stortz wrote:
the guy who invented xerography,
the process used by all modern copiers and laser printers, tried to sell the idea to ibm,
they weren't interested, so xerox was born! another big company who wound up competing
with ibm in several other areas just because they missed a big, big chance.
Well, it took Haloid some 13-14 years before they were an 'overnight' success, something I rather doubt would be allowed in todays 'gotta make a profit by next quarter' business world.
They certainly wouldn't have survived the first, disastrous model released in the late 1940's. (A recent Scientific American article recounts the history of Chester Carlson and his decades-long struggle to bring his idea to fruition. He first demonstrated it in 1937; it wasn't until 1959 that Xerox finally introduced the first practical model.)
And it's interesting you mentioned laser printers. Xerox nearly fired the guy who invented the laser printing process because he wasn't concentrating on improving copiers. They DID end up exiling him to PARC (then a backwater of the main, more prestigious research center in New York), and squeezing his budget to the point where he had to cannibalize another research project to get his prototype working.
(See "Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age" by Michael Hiltzik and "Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored the First Personal Computer" by Douglas K. Smith, Robert C. Alexander)
Whereupon everyone at PARC was so taken with this great printer, that the prototype was immediately pressed into production service there, and Xerox had to examine the prototype at night, and promise PARC the first production models.
Companies that are young take risks, Companies that are established don't; they have too much to lose.
HP, while helmed by Dave and Bill, was the rare exception...and even they passed on the Apple II :-/
(Trivia note...I'm fairly certain the first desktop system using a Motorola 68000 CPU and 3 1/2" floppies was NOT the Mac, but an HP (running a modified version of MS-DOS...Hmmmm....) I wrote programs for one in early 1985, (and it was a few years old at the time); we used it as an instrument controller and data analysis system in a lab I worked in. That was a neat system. The guy in the lab next to me had this little, fast and quiet printer, too, the first model inkjet.)
ibm could have owned the copier market, but for whatever reason they just weren't
impressed, but others were correctly impressed enough to fund this startup dedicated to
making copiers. just imagine how rich some of those initial investors got!
Very wealthy indeed, and it turned Xerox into one of the biggest companies in history.
-- "Wherever you go, there you are." - B. Banzai, Ph.D. Bruce Johnson
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