Xerox: Quick to Innovate. Slow to Integrate.

is really fascinating to me. You're talking about a company that was founded in nineteen o six and did not come out with the flagship product that everyone associates with it for more than four decades. It was really almost like essentially five decades before Xerox came out with a photocetic or electro setic copier and that was the point where they you is the term zerography and started to switch their company name from Halloid Corporation to Xerox. And

that story alone was really interesting. That's what took up part one. So I guess the too long, didn't read version is right there, but you should go back and listen to part one. If you haven't already Part two. We're going to explore what happened in the wake of Xerox kind of finding its corporate identity as far as what its new product lines were going to be, and how it ended up having an interesting era of innovation

while simultaneously not really capitalizing on it very well. And as it turns out, the story is big enough to require a part three. I really thought it was going to be a two parter. I set out to make a two parter, I swear to you, guys, But once I hit the late nineties, I realized there's just way too much stuff. I had started to summarize items, and I realized that the summaries, while they were accurate, didn't

really give you a satisfying story. I mean, it just sounds like someone rattling off bullet points, and you guys deserve better than that. So instead of doing that, I'm gonna do even more research and do a Part three, because there's some really crazy stuff that went on at Xerox at the upper levels of management. I'm talking like cloak and dagger betrayals at the most senior levels of leadership at Xerox Company in the late nineties, So we're gonna explore that in part three. But now this is

gonna be um. This is gonna be the calm before the storm. So it's not exactly like the Star Wars trilogy where you hit Empire strikes back and then everyone's at their lowest point. Now the lowest point is gonna happen sometime in part three. But don't worry. There will also be some form of resolution, but there won't be an ending because Xerox is still existing, and so we won't actually have a the end. We'll just have a

the end question mark. When we last left our hero known as Xerox, the company had just started to experience serious revenue growth in the early nineteen sixties. The company had made its money on photographic paper products up to that point, but now had branched out by creating electro static copiers, which used the electro static charge to imprint paper with toner It used photo conductive materials selenium specifically, in order to do this. We will touch back on

that in a little bit. And this was a much faster method than earlier technologies that would allow you to make copies, and the orders were pouring in from enterprises around the world. Enterprises as in big companies. That's what Xerox was targeting. They were looking at selling products to major companies, not to your individual consumers that was not really on their radar, and pretty much that was fueling

Xerox's success. It was practically doubling their revenue every year for a few years, they started seeing those number go up dramatically year over year. That led to Fortune magazine to declare Xerox the most successful product ever marketed in America. Specifically, they were talking about the nine fourteen copier, so called because that was the dimensions of paper you could use

in the machine, nine inches by fourteen inches. So yeah, they had gone from a modest, little photographic paper company to one of the biggest companies in America due to this incredibly popular and very profitable product. In nineteen sixty two, Xerox formed a joint venture with the Japanese photography company Fuji Photo Film Company, and this venture was called the Fuji Xerox Company Limited, and essentially it was formed so that they could distribute Xerox products in Japan and later

it also served as a research and development platform. So Fuji and Xerox would work together doing R and D on various technologies. That same year, Xerox acquired University Microfilms. This was a small company founded by Eugene Power. It got its start preserving works from the British Museum and it was preserving them obviously on microfilm. As you would

imagine based on the name. The company changed names a few times while it was under Xerox's ownership, but ultimately the company would sell off University Microfilms to another company called Bell and Howell in the nineteen eighties, and today University Microfilms is better known as pro Quest, so if you ever heard a pro Quest, it started off as University Microfilms and for a while it was owned by Xerox.

In nineteen sixty three, Xerox acquired Electro Optical Systems, and that same year Xerox released the first desktop cop year called the Xerox eight thirteen, and like the nine fourteen, this was named by the dimensions of paper you could use in it. Unlike that larger nine fourteen, this one didn't sell nearly as well, and eventually the company would discontinue it decide that it would really just focus on developing those larger, high capacity copiers and leave the desktop

market to other companies. For the most part, this would eventually come back to haunt them. Xerox also formed a joint venture with the Rank Organization, which was not a group of smelly people, but instead, the Rank Organization was a company out of the United Kingdom, was a film company. It's an entertainment conglomerate. And in the late nineteen forties the Rank Organization had hit on hard times. The leadership of the Rank Organization looked for ways to diversify their businesses.

A purchased a radio station in nineteen forty nine, and they entered into this venture with the Halloid Slash Xerox Company in nineteen fifty six. Nine years later, in nineteen sixty five, Rank Slash Xerox opening manufacturing plant in ven Ree, the Netherlands. And business is so weird, you guys. There's a lot of interesting and odd joint ventures in Xerox's past. Now, Joe Wilson, you may remember Joe Wilson as the son

of the founder of the Halloyd Corporation. He was also the man who instilled a lot of his own personal values into the company that became kind of its mission statement. He stepped down as president of Xerox in nineteen sixty six. He kind of thought that once you started hitting sixty years old, you should really withdraw from leadership positions in

the company, and that became a tradition at Xerox. As c e O s or presidents would start to hit sixty, they would typically resign and they would train up somebody to be their replacement. Uh. Kind of a scythe apprentice thing going on there, but you know less, sinister. Now. Wilson would remain the CEO of the company for another year until nineteen sixty seven, and he was chairman of the board until he passed away in nineteen seventy one

at the age of sixty one years old. Wilson had imbued the company with a focus on innovation, as he had felt since he first started at the Halloy Company that sitting back and relying on an established business was a guaranteed path to failure in the long run. His successor in all three of his roles of President, CEO, and chairman was C. Peter McCullough. Now, a little bit more on Wilson is warranted, However, before we move on with the rest of the Xerox story. So Wilson had

involved himself in numerous social causes. In his will, he willed more than twenty million dollars in cash and even more in stock options to the University of Rochester. Upon his death, the university actually closed down campus except for emergency services in the hospital, for two days of mourning

in memory of Joe Wilson. He had spoken at a conference for a Council for Financial Aid to Education and the Academy of Political Science, and at that speech he said that quote businessmen and scientists have a moral imperi div to extend their technology to society end quote, and went on to say, quote, our technology has not lived up to its obligations to society. Technological companies are at the center of social change and therefore have a responsibility.

Those in the inner city have derived little benefit from technology and no profit from it end quote. And I really think it's kind of remarkable that a successful businessman, he's a multi millionaire who came from a family of conservatives. He himself was a registered Republican, though he was certainly less of a conservative Republican than some of his family were, but he saw that there was this social responsibility on the part of successful business owners to contribute back to society.

And I should also say that during this time the Republican Party was a little different than the modern Republican Party, but even so he had several more like Democratic Party leanings although he identified as Republican. His successor McCulla, whom

Wilson chose, was in fact a registered Democrats. So Wilson also was able to rise above his own political beliefs and look at a person's contributions and say this is the right person for the job, even if they did not agree on everything politically, which I think is also very telling of Joe Wilson's character. Uh McCulloch was born in Canada. He was the son of the Director of Public Works for Canadian Parliament, and he attended the Harvard

Harvard Business School and graduated with a degree. After serving in World War Two, he served in the British Navy briefly in the last year of World War Two. He had started back at nineteen fifty four at Halloyd as the general manager of the company's first reproduction service center in Chicago, and by nineteen fifty nine he had been

named a general sales manager. In nineteen sixty he became the vice president for sales, and nineteen sixty one he was elected to the board of directors and he assumed the role of president in nineteen sixty six. So it was a pretty meteoric rise in the ranks, and like Joe Wilson, McCullough had a strong sense of social justice. He and Wilson had created an affirmative action program at the company, which continued under McCullough's leadership when he became

president and CEO. This was really remarkable. Remember this is during the era of civil rights, when there was a lot of turmoil going on in the United States on these issues, and meanwhile the leadership of Xerox came out and said, we fully support trying to balance the scales to create a system that will promote equality at our company, which I think says a lot again about the leadership

of the company at the time. Mccull and Wilson shared many of the same beliefs, including a strong reliance upon innovation, but many would say McCullough would take Xerox into a new direction and lead the company to unprecedented profit as well as steered into some stormy waters. In nineteen six s seven, in an effort to reduce waste and costs, Xerox began a new policy of recovering metals from used photo receptor drums. Remember this is the big drum inside

of a photocopier that carries that electrostatic charge. Use light to negate that charge, and then you put toner. The towner adheres to any place where the light has not touched, and then a similarly charged piece of paper that actually carries a stronger charge than the drum does will pick up the toner, move through a pair of fusers. These are high temperature rollers, and then the ink or toner

is fused onto the paper. Well, those those photo receptor drums had some hazardous materials two as part of them. I mean, it was just it required using some stuff that's pretty dangerous, including some heavy metals, which is not the kind of music nor the Ralph Boxhi film. It is instead, in fact actual heavy metals. Uh So the company had to purchase those regularly in order to make the photo receptor drums. Those are expensive and they're dangerous

to ships. So by reclaiming some of those materials from older drums. The Xerox was able to reduce their reliance on new material, and they viewed that as both economical and environmentally friendly. In ninety eight, at the age of sixty two, Chester Carlson passed away. Now, if that name does not sound familiar, you haven't listened to part one, but if you did, you may remember he was the inventor of the electrostatic copier. His success was emblematic of

the American dream. He worked for a printer when he was in high school. He received from his employer an old printing press that otherwise was going to be destroyed, and he used it to print a magazine for amateur chemists. He attended junior college and majored in chemistry before he transferred to the California Institute of Technology Caltech, in other words, and earned a degree in physics while he was there.

When he graduated college, he did so just as the Great Depression was really taking its toll, and so his prospects were pretty grim. He worked in patent law, as I mentioned in the last episode, and he found himself frequently in need of making copies of material, and that's not an easy thing to do in the era before photo copiers. So Carlson, wishing to put his knowledge of physics and chemistry to use, wanted to solve that problem.

I talked about how he did that in the last episode, so I'm not going to retread it here, but let's just say he ended up falling in with Halloyd, which later, of course became Xerox. This was after he had been turned away by twenty different companies that were uninterested in his ideas. Now, he earned millions of dollars from his invention, like a hundred fifty million dollars, which is already a

huge amount of money before you adjusted for inflation. But he was also a philanthropist, and he gave away more than a hundred million dollars in his lifetime to charities and foundations. He was awarded numerous times for his contributions to business and science as well as for his philanthropy, and his passing was also marked with reverence and sorrow. Also, in nineteen sixty eight, Xerox opened the Xerox Tower in Rochester,

New York. Remember that was their headquarters. It's where the Wilsons were living when they founded Halloyd Corporation, which would later become Xerox, But just one year later, in nineteen sixty nine, the new president and CEO McCullough, would lead the company in a new direction, literally by relocating the corporate headquarters to Stanford, Connecticut. By this time, the company was making one billion dollars in revenue and had been listed as one of the one largest corporations in the

United States. McCullough was looking into the future and was imagining a world in which the offices of tomorrow wouldn't need paper at all. Everything would be stored in some other medium. And this probably sounds familiar to anyone who has gone through one of those big technological rollouts at a company where people are talking a big game early on, saying, Oh, it's gonna eliminate the need of ever having a print out or a piece of paper. You'll never have to

touch it. I'm still waiting for that day. I'm still waiting for the paperless office. But Xerox's approach to this, initially at least, was to invest in existing companies. So to that end, Xerox made an enormous deal, some would say a truly disastrous one, with a computer company called Scientific Data Systems in nineteen sixty nine, and that acquisition deal costs Xerox nearly a billion dollars in stocks. Unfortunately for Xerox, that particular deal would not work out for

the company. The computers, which were not meant for the general public, were difficult to sell. They were meant for scientific research and government organizations. By nineteen seventy five, Xerox executives realized that this division wasn't going anywhere, and they shut it all down. But that wouldn't be the only contribution Xerox would make to the world of computing. When we come back, we'll look at the R and D branch Xerox form that is responsible for how we interact

with technology today. But first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. So we're up to nineteen seventy, which is when Xerox made a few other moves that would expand its influence, and one was the formation of the Xerox Computer Services Division as the company acquired other computer companies. The other big one was the formation of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center or Park Facility p A r C in California. Park became an incredibly important

R and D facility. The work going on there in the nineteen seventies would later transform personal computers in the nineteen eighties. Xerox Park opened on July one, nineteen seventy, and the whole purpose of this part of the company was to innovate new technologies. The focus at that time was on computing, which was the realm of scientific research centers, universities, big business, and the military. There were no such things as personal computers that early on. In fact, many computers

had no digital or analog display. You had to rely on a lighted panel or read results that were printed out on long strings of paper tape. Because Park played such an important role in Xerox, I'm going to peel off from the main company for a bit and talk about what was going on over at Park before jumping back into the main company's timeline. So let's park it in Park for a bit. I don't feel good about that.

In Park pioneered a method of printing a bitmapped electronic image on a zero graphic copyer drum using laser printing. Seems simple enough, no, but seriously, how the heck does that work? Was it even me? So? If you listen to the last episode and I hope you did. Otherwise, this show is really confusing to you. You learned about how photocopiers use light to create an electrostatic charge on a photo conductive drum. Laser printers follow a very similar principle.

So you have a printer or a copier, inside of which is a rotating drum, a cylindrical piece of equipment that turns, it rotates around its axis, and near this rotating drum, which is photo conductive, that means that when light hits it, it can actually create conductivity. You can have electron movement through the material. Near it, you would have a wire. It's called a corona wire. It's not kind of beer, it's just that's what called a corona wire.

You run uh an electrical current thread. You actually create a voltage through this wire, and this preps the drum as the drum rotates. The drum rotates near this high volt toge corona wire, and that ends up giving the rotating drum a charge. And now, for the purposes of this example, let's just say it's a positive charge. You could do this with a negative charge to everything would be reversed, but we're gonna say positive charge for this one. So you get a positive charge on the surface of

this rotating drum. The laser beam would shine down onto this photo conductive drum as it rotates, drawing out the various letters and images that are supposed to be printed on the paper. It hits all the points that are supposed to be covered in toner. In other words, all the points that should show up as a positive image, uh, you know, having actual ink on it. The reaction between the laser and the photo conductive drum creates a negatively

charged area on the drums surface. So think of it as painting the drums surface with light, and when you finish painting with light, there's an electro static charge there, and it's a negative charge. The lasers very narrow and it's very focused, so we can do this with really great precision. The printer then coats the drum and positively charged toner. Now we all remember cool Om's law, right, We all follow it whether we want to or not. Coulomb's law is that like charges oppose each other, and

opposite charges attract. Just like Paul Abduel said, the positively charged areas of the drum, which were the ones that were not touched by the laser. Those repel the toner because the toner itself is also positively charged, and light charge repels like But the negatively charged sections, the ones that the laser actually drew upon, those attract toner. Ton or sticks to that part of the drum. So then the toner adheres to that part of the rotating drum

as it goes around. Next comes the paper. Now the paper first will pass by a negatively charged corona wire. This imparts a very strong negative electrostatic charge to the paper itself, and the charge has to be stronger than the one that's on the rotating drum, because then whichever charge is strongest is going to pull the hardest at the toner. The toner is going to go which whichever

one is the strongest. Think of the toner in this case as a rope in a in a game of tug of war, and the paper that's just gone past the corona wire is a big beefy dude, and the photo conductive drum is a not so strong dude. Or hey, let's say it's a big strong woman is the paper one, and the photo conductive dramas myself. Well, the strong woman is totally gonna win that game of tug of war. Let's just face it. She will. And the same thing

is true with this particular scenario. The paper comes in, the electrostatic charge is stronger on the paper than it is on the drum. It then attracts all the toner onto the paper, and of course the toner is in the shape that was drawn by that laser, and that means all the words, all the images, everything is drawn out specifically the way the laser had it had moved across the surface of this drum. The paper then passes through a pair of high temperature rollers called the fusers.

This melts the toner so that it fuses with the paper. The toner has these little plastic particles inside of it, and by melting it, that's what makes it stick to the paper, and it doesn't just brush off when it comes out, because otherwise you just have a electrostatically charged piece of paper and some electrostatically charged bits of toner, and then you know, a good shake would make all of that fall away. So it has to be melted to the surface of the paper for it to be

fused there. And then the drum meanwhile continues its rotation and that rotation takes it past what is called a discharge lamp, and essentially that erases the drum and prepares it for the next electro static image. So the discharge lamp kind of sets it at zero. The next time the drama rotates past the corona wire, it will be prepared again with its positive charge, and the whole process

can start all over. This, by the way, happens incredibly fast, which is why you can make lots and lots of copies in a short amount of time, because it's just constantly happening as the dramas rotating. It's actually pretty remarkable at how fast this can happen. When you think about it that it's it's redrawing new images or perhaps the same image over and over again. Uh, it's pretty incredible. So you can see that this is similar in many ways to the earlier form of zerography that they had

pioneered in the fifties and sixties. The use of lasers allowed for more accurate and finally detailed copies, so you had an increase in quality. Back to the timeline. In nineteen two, researchers at Park developed the programming language small talk. This was an early example of an object oriented programming language. The language pioneered several features that would become standard elements

of future programming languages. But i recently did a couple of episodes on the history of programming languages, so I'm not going to retread all of that here. You can go back and listen to it to learn more about programming languages, what they do, and how they evolved over time. Back at Xerox Park, in nineteen seventy three, they created the Alto. Now, the Alto was one of the first computers that could be said to fall into a personal

computer category. But there's a big asterisk next to that, and that asterisk leads to a footnote, and that footnote says it was never really sold to the general public. Xerox didn't intend for those to go to the average consumer.

They weren't looking at the average person as a potential customer. Instead, these computers were made for internal use at Park itself, so it became kind of a development platform people who were working on computer science projects where it would use the Alto as sort of the platform to build them. So these would be various user interfaces things like that.

Alto was the tool that they would use to develop these things, but they never really thought, hey, we shouldn't make a version of this and sell it to people, because people will totally buy it. So researchers began working on projects that would one day find elements of those projects incorporated into consumer products, but most of those consumer

products would be offered by other companies, not Xerox. In fact, that's one of the big problems Xerox faced later on, is that they made a lot of really useful stuff, but it turned out they didn't really make good leverage of it. Right, they invented it, but they didn't really bring it to market in a way that was meaningful. Other companies would just end up incorporating those ideas into their own designs and then they made all the bank off of it. For example, one of those early projects

was a whizzy wig editor. Now, whizziwig stands for what you see is what you get, meaning you can see the thing you are editing and make changes to it with those changes immediately reflected on screen. So the way I usually described this is if you look at the early days of developing web pages, the only way you could really create a web page was using a text editor. And you would build the page out using HTML hypertext

markup language. Typically you'd build out a page in code. Essentially, it's pretty simple code, but still code, so you'd build it out. You would save it, so you save a text file that has all this code in it. You would open up a browser. You would open up the language that you had just saved. The browser would interpret that as a web page and display it in front of you, and then you would look at it and you would say, yes, that's exactly what I want, or

you might say this is terrible. Everything is misaligned. Nothing is the right color, the font is the wrong size, lots of different things could go wrong, at which point you would close out the browser. You would open up the text editor. You would go through the ht mL. You would try and find where you went wrong, and you would try and fix it, and then you would do it all over again. Save it, open up a browser, open up that code, see if it looks any better.

It was a real trial and error process. It took a lot of time, whereas whizzy wig would just allow you to see what the page is supposed to look like from the beginning, and you can make those changes directly and see how it looks immediately and not have to do this start stop process that you would have to do otherwise. It's a pretty big leap. Now they were looking at whizzy Wig editors for all sorts of stuff, not web pages. Web Pages were not a thing back

in the nineteen seventies. But I just used that as an example because it was something I have had personal experience with. I used to program web pages in HTML, and I couldn't do it today, It's been too long since i've I've done it, but it was painstaking and it was easy to make mistakes and hard to figure out where those mistakes were. So whizzy Wig was a big step up in making it more user friendly and

easy to make changes to various types of documents. Meanwhile, as other engineers were working on our pannet, which was the predecessor to the Internet, or a predecessor to the Internet, I should say, Xerox was pioneering ethernet networking, and this is a way of connecting hardware like printers and computers

together in a local area network or land. It was a revolutionary idea at the time, and it would make a big impact as it spread beyond Xerox and something else that happened at Xerox Park involved an influx of new talent from another lab. That lab was the Stanford Research Institute Lab s r I, and there was a man there named Douglas ingle Bart who was working at s r I, and ingle Bart was a visionary and his work created the foundation for modern personal computer interface

his Inglebart himself was not connected to Xerox Park. He didn't work for them, but several of his team did defect to Park in the nineteen seventies. Now, the reasons for that were multiple multiple in nature. There were some people who just found Inglebart's personality a bit much and they just found it difficult to work with them, so they wanted to work somewhere else. There were others who were just convinced that he had the wrong idea as

far as where computers should go next. He had this kind of time sharing idea where multiple users would all take advantage of a very powerful machine, but no one would necessarily own it. You would have access to it. So this is similar to the way computer labs were

working in universities at the time. But a lot of the people on his team thought that personal computers were the next big thing, and this was a fundamental disagreement in the philosophy of where computers were going, and so team members began to leave Inglebart's team, and they ended

up some of them anyway joining Park. Now, all the ideas that Inglebart was putting forward included some pretty revolutionary ones for the time being, including things like a graphic user interface or gooey So Windows is an example of a graphic user interface, Windows based applications, meaning that you could actually have a window on your screen running some form of application, maybe it's a word processing program or

something along those lines. Ingle Bart also created the computer mouse, or at least his team did, and he demonstrated those technologies and more at a big computer conference in the winter of nineteen sixty eight. Now that was two years before Xerox Park was founded, So again ingle Bart had had experience with this and was pioneering in this years

before Xerox Park. The reason I make this point now is because some people will simplify the story and say that Xerox Park invented things like the computer mouse and the graphic user interface and word processing. That's not really true. A lot of that was pioneered at Stanford Research Institute. It's just that those team members eventually went over to Xerox Park, and it was Xerox Park that ended up

becoming sort of ground zero for these ideas in Silicon Valley. Ah, but you couldn't You can trace it all the way back to Inglebart. The demonstration he did became known later on as the Mother of All demos, which tells you how much stuff he was actually showing off. Got this moniker due to having so many elements. Included that we're a brand new way of computing, and they were ideas that would end up having a massive impact on personal computering in general a couple of decades later. Uh. At

the time, that industry didn't even really exist. So ingle Bart was showing off concepts like word processing, windowed functions, video conferencing, real time collaboration tools, which is pretty incredible stuff like you know what you might see with Google Docs today. Uh. He also showed off the computer mouse and navigation strategies used the computer mouse, and included a ton of stuff that would become intrinsic to computing over

the next couple of decades. Well's team when they left ended up bringing that information over to Xerox Park, and so Xerox began to incorporate some of those same ideas into its Alto platform, But the Alto was still very much an internal product. It was not something made for the outside world, so the general public remained ignorant of this.

Xerox was not very They weren't very communicative with what was going on at Park because the whole purpose of that division was to do research and development and to give Xerox a competitive advantage in the marketplace, so you wouldn't talk about this. The Alto, as it turns out, probably wouldn't have been a big hit even if it had been sold to consumers, largely because its stats were a little underwhelming for the time being. It was an

interesting development tool, but not much more than that. I got a lot more to say about Xerox Park, but before I up into that, let's take another quick break and thank our sponsor. All Right, we're up to nineteen seventy four. The whizzy Wig editors get added functionality like cutting paste, so cutting paste became a thing in nineteen seventy four. Apple on the iPhone would wait quite some time before incorporating it onto the iOS that's just me taking a swipe at Apple. It will not be the

last time I do it. Park also created a word processing program in nineteen seventy four called Bravo, and in nineteen seventy five Park showed off a graphic user interface or a gooey. Uh. This is a way of an interfacing with a computer where the graphics are representing different commands. So we think of just Windows or mac os that's essentially a gooey, or any real like smartphone in her face is a gooey. You would typically click on something

or tap something in order to activate it. That's your basic graphic user interface navigation. But it really got start in the late sixties and early seventies. Uh. They also included uh, not just the icons that were representing different programs, but pop up menus and overlapping windows, so you could have multiple applications open on the same computer and you

could navigate easily by clicking on the different windows. So these are basic things that would find their way into operating systems in the future, but they were really revolutionary back in the nineteen seventies, and you would use a mouse to navigate it. These were all refined elements that again were earlier found in Inglebart's work back at Stanford Research Institute. So I don't mean to suggest that the

people at Xerox Park invented this. They took these ideas that had been initially developed at s r I, and they began to evolve them and innovate upon them and refine them. So uh, they were better implementations. Still not great implementations according to some people, but better than the proof of concept stuff from the nineteen sixties. And think

for a moment about how transformative Inglebart's mouse was. I mean, there's a lot of work that Inglebart did that was incredibly impactful in the computer world, but the mouse is just one of those things that is so fundamental to our experience of computers these days that I wanted to take a moment to just think about how amazing it is that it even became a thing. It was just had such an enormous impact. It's a bit of a mind bender, really to think about moving a cursor on

a screen. Typically it's a screen that's on our relatively vertical plane. Like you have a usually have a screen in front of you that is vertically aligned, so that it's standing up, you're looking straight ahead, you can see the cursor on there. Meanwhile, you are moving a device along a horizontal plane, like a desktop. So you're moving a device on the horizontal plane to manipulate a cursor that's on the vertical plane, and your brain just handles

this pretty easily. A lot of people might have thought, just initially, without having experienced this, that it would be really difficult to pick up that you are moving something along one x y axis and meanwhile, ninety degrees removed from that x y axis, you're moving something else in order to control that. Uh. It just seems counterintuitive, but in fact it works really well, and so we're pretty lucky that our brains are capable of taking on this challenge.

On most days. Anyway, I'm just speaking for myself here, there are some days where even operating a mouse is particularly challenging to me. In n a young entrepreneur negotiated a special visit to Xerox Park. Now this was highly out of the ordinary because the work at park was pretty hush hush. I mean, it was not quite a skunk works, but it was almost that quiet. So getting a visit, especially when you are in charge of a company that could theoretically compete with Xerox was a big deal.

This young businessman offered up a significant share in his young company before it was going to have its own initial public offering or i p O. That's when you create a company and you make it publicly traded so people can purchase stocks. So essentially, this young entrepreneur comes to Xerox park and says, I really want to take a look at what you're doing in there, and they said,

it's not really what we're comfortable with. And he says, well, I got this company over here, it's about to go public, and I can totally cut you guys a huge deal and give you a whole bunch of stock in this brand new company before it goes public, and then you'll just end up being able to see lots of profit as my company is incredibly successful. Now. For a lot of companies, they would have said, hey, go pound sand

get out of here, you bother in me. But Xerox said all right, and they accepted this young entrepreneurs deal. That young man was Steve Jobs, and his company was, of course Apple Computer, and Jobs was really impressed by the demonstration of Xerox's technologies, many of which again originated

with Inglebart's team way back at Stanford Research Institute. And while Jobs was convinced that Xerox was never really going to do anything with that in the consumer space, he just didn't think that their version of it was a really good version. He did think the ideas were astounding and important. He was certain he could take those same ideas and make an incredible machine. So he went back to Apple and immediately began to incorporate those features into

a new design for the upcoming Macintosh computer. If you listen to my episodes about the history of the Macintosh, you'll remember how much turmoil Jobs decisions caused. It's ultimately culminated in Jobs as forced exit from his own company. But that's a story we've already told, so I'm not

going to retread it here. Just go back and listen to the history of the Macintosh and you'll hear how Steve Jobs, once he got all these great ideas, totally took over the Macintosh design process and through the whole project into disarray, arguably for the better, but certainly in the short term. It was very tumultuous over at Apple Computers.

In nineteen eighty, Park would develop magneto optical storage devices which could store data on them, but we're not erasable, so once you wrote data to the disc, that was it. It was gonna be there forever until the disc was destroyed, and this would eventually find its way into a commercial product and would spawn off a spinoff company called optimim. In two, Park created the first fiber optics based local

area network, which is pretty incredible. Fiber optics are super cool, and we've done a tech stuff episode on those in the past. I want to say that that was one that Chris Pallette and I did many years ago. So if you do the search on the RSS feed for fiber optics, it should pop up. In nineteen eight six, Park introduced the world to multi beam lasers, which would be used in various printing systems to create an even faster experience for customers. Again, those customers were, for the

most part, big corporations. Xerox still wasn't terribly interested in making products for the average person. Seven saw Part create a sixteen bit coding system for characters in order to allow computers to represent text in any language. So there are a lot of different languages with different alphabets, right, sort of like alphabet, and you've got the standard of

English alphabet, You've got lots of different versions. You've got various European alphabets that have characters that are not found in English. We don't have too many oomblouts over here in the English language, for example, or various excit grav or excit you so uh. This was a way of encoding all those different characters and making sure that they had representation on computers so that computers could display and ultimately and interpret this kind of text. This would eventually

be developed into a standard later called Unicode. In nineteen Xerox Park sort of predicted the Internet of things. Now. Back in those days, it was called ubiquitous computing, and it really referred to the way that computers could be integrated into more elements of our lives, such as our vehicles and personal devices. Park also worked with some early mobile device designs at the time, although if you were to compare them to today's mobile devices, they look super clunky,

but they were really forward thinking. Xerox was saying, you know, eventually, we're going to have these little computer like devices that are going to be very important in how we interact with the world. I'm sure that it was even pretty modest compared to what we can do today with our smart devices, but still it was showing that they were thinking ahead and yet still not really capitalizing on it

in any sort of consumer or commercial way. In ninete Park researchers helped work on the protocols and standards for the implementation of the Internet. Now, the Internet was already a thing by It's not like it was brand new, but it was just starting to become something that the mainstream public was aware of. Ninety two is still pretty

early for the mainstream public. A lot of people who knew about the Internet were folks who were in college because a lot of universities had Internet labs, and of course the Worldwide Web was just getting started in ninety two, so it wasn't like it was widely understood at that point. In two thousand, Park developed a flexible digital document display tech that they called electronic Reusable Paper, and Park would create a spinoff company called Gyra Coon Media to commercialize

this e paper product. A decade later, in two thousand two, zero X would spin off Park and it would become an independent subsidiary. So Park still exists, but it is not Xerox Park anymore. It's kind of its own independent research and development company. Now, there's still a lot to

say about Xerox itself. While Park was working on these new innovations, the company continued to make products, mostly again for the enterprise consumerteen copier that put Xerox on the map boasted a seventy percent profit margin because of the amount it costs to make one versus the amount that Xerox could charge companies to buy it. So Xerox was making a seventy profit on every sale of one of

these copiers. It was retired in the early nineteen seventies because eventually they just had too many other products that were faster, more efficient than the nine fourteen. But it did show that Xerox had a very strong incentive for going after those enterprise customers be because that's where the

profit was. You didn't have to produce nearly as much product to make a huge amount of money, because if you're making a profit margin, then it's all right if you have fewer sales per year, because you're making more money per sale than you would if you were using something else. It's one of the reasons why Xerox was so reluctant to move into other markets like the consumer marketplace.

It just made more sense financially to continue developing for the enterprise, so it could have pivoted to aim at consumers. But why would you unless you happen to have enough foresight to say things are not going to stay the same forever. And I thought this was really going to be a two partter, like I said the beginning, but it turns out the story is just too big. So in our next episode, I'm going to finish out the Xerox story. And there's some complicated things that happened in

that timeline that we're gonna need to look into. For example, we'll learn what happened to the company as a result of it focusing on those high price commercial machines and the trouble the organization got into when serious competition that market popped up. Here's a bit of a spoiler for that. You had a lot of companies in Japan that we're starting to make photo copiers. There were other big competitors that that the Xerox company was looking at, including Kodak, IBM, Cannon.

But the real problem where these smaller Japanese companies that were able to make photo copiers and sell them at much lower prices than Xerox. They were undercutting the Xerox sales. Xerox went from having a n share in the market near a near monopoly, it was practically a monopoly in photo copiers to going down to below fient in just a few years. Now, how did that happen? Why the precipitous fall that's going to be the focus of part three of the Xerox Story. What exactly happened to make

the company have such a rough time him? And what is the crazy power struggle that happened at the very top levels of Xerox, And why did it come about? Why did Xerox hire a CEO and then fire that CEO just a year later? What was going on? That's gonna be the focus of the next one. That's as that's as good of a cliffhanger as I can leave you with with the Xerox Story Part two. We'll tune in next time with the Xerox Story Part three, and we will conclude this story and then we'll move on

to other topics. And meanwhile, let's say that you've got a suggestion for a future episode topic and it's just burning a little hole in your brain and you want to stop it because that hurts and the smells distracting, then send it to me. I'll deal with the burning brain problem. Just write me an email. The email addresses tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter to

handle it. Both of those is text of h s W. You can also watch me record this show live on Wednesdays and Friday's. That's over at twitch dot tv slash tech Stuff. You can just go over there. You'll see the schedule of when I record. I love chatting with you guys and hanging out before and after the show and during the ad breaks as well, so you can have a real time discussion more or less with me.

It's not quite real time, there's like a ten second delay, but apart from that, as real time as it gets. So I hope to see you there and I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it has to works dot Com