Xerox Holdings Corporation (, ZEER-oks) is an American corporation that sells printers, digital document products, and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox was the pioneer of the photocopier market, beginning with the introduction of the Xerox 914 in 1959, so much so that the word xerox is commonly used as a synonym for photocopy. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut, though it is incorporated in New York with its largest group of employees based around Rochester, New York, where the company was founded. As a large, established business, it is consistently placed on the Fortune 500 list of companies. The company purchased Affiliated Computer Services for $6.4 billion in early 2010. On December 31, 2016, Xerox separated its business process service operations, essentially those operations acquired with the purchase of Affiliated Computer Services, into a new publicly traded company, Conduent. Xerox focused on its document technology and document outsourcing business and traded on the NYSE from 1961 to 2021 and on the Nasdaq since 2021. Researchers at Xerox and its Palo Alto Research Center invented several important elements of personal computing, such as the desktop metaphor GUI, the computer mouse and desktop computing. The concepts were adopted by Apple and later Microsoft.
History Xerox was founded in 1906 in Rochester, New York, as Haloid. It manufactured photographic paper and equipment. In 1938, Chester Carlson, a physicist working independently, invented a process for printing images using an electrically charged photoconductor-coated metal plate and dry powder “toner.” However, it would take over 20 years of refinement before the first automated machine to make copies was commercialized, using a document feeder, scanning light, and a rotating drum.
Joseph C. Wilson, credited as the “founder of Xerox”, took over Haloid from his father. He saw the promise of Carlson's invention and, in 1946, signed an agreement to develop it as a commercial product. Wilson remained as President/CEO of Xerox until 1967 and served as chairman until his death in 1971. Looking for a term to differentiate its new system, Haloid hired a Greek scholar at Ohio State University and coined the term xerography from two Greek roots meaning “dry writing.” Haloid changed its name to Haloid Xerox in 1958 and then Xerox in 1961. Before releasing the 914, Xerox tested the market with a prototype hand-operated machine known as the Flat-plate 1385. The 1385 was not a viable copier because of its slow speed. Consequently, it was sold as a platemaker for the Addressograph-Multigraph Multilith 1250 and related sheet-fed offset printing presses in the offset lithography market. It was a higher-quality, commercially available plate camera mounted as a horizontal rostrum camera, complete with photo-flood lighting and a timer. The glass film/plate had been replaced with a selenium-coated aluminum plate. Electrics turned this into a quick-developing and reusable substitute for film. A skilled user could quickly produce paper and metal printing plates. Having started as a supplier to the offset lithography duplicating industry, Xerox then set its sights on capturing some of offset's market share. The 1385 was followed by the first automatic xerographic printer, the Copyflo, in 1955. The Copyflo was a large microfilm printer that could produce positive prints on roll paper from any type of microfilm negative. Following the Copyflo, the process was scaled down to produce the 1824 microfilm printer. At about half the size and weight, this still sizable machine printed onto hand-fed, cut-sheet paper, which was pulled through the process by one of two gripper bars. A scaled-down version of this gripper feed system became the basis for the 813 desktop copier.
Xerox 914
The company came to prominence in 1959 with the introduction of the Xerox 914. The 914, the first plain paper photocopier, was developed by Carlson and John H. Dessauer; it was so popular that by the end of 1961, Xerox had almost $60 million in revenue. The product was sold by an innovative ad campaign showing that even monkeys could make copies at the touch of a button; simplicity became the foundation of Xerox products and user interfaces. Revenues leaped to over $500 million by 1965.
Xeronic Computer Printer
In 1956, Haloid formed a joint venture in the UK with Rank Organisation whose Rank Precision Industries subsidiary was charged with anglicizing the US products. Rank's Precision Industries went on to develop the Xeronic computer printer, and Rank Data Systems was set up to bring the product to market. It used cathode-ray tubes to generate the characters and forms that could be overlaid from microfilm images. Initially, it planned for the Ferranti and AEI computer companies to sell the Xeronic as an on-line peripheral, but due to interface problems, Rank switched to a magnetic tape off-line technique. In 1962, Lyons Computers placed an order for use with its LEO III computer, and the printer was delivered in 1964. It printed 2,888 lines per minute, slower than the target of 5,000 lpm.
1960s
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