Speaker 1: Get in text with technology with tech Stuff from dot Com.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I am your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer here at how Stuff Works,
Speaker 1: and I like to talk about all things tech. You guys,
Speaker 1: listen to the last episode, the Xerox Story, Part one,
Speaker 1: then you know what this episode is going to be.
Speaker 1: It's done to be part two of that series, and
Speaker 1: spoiler alert, there will be a part part three because
Speaker 1: it's a bigger story than I anticipated. The Xerox story
Speaker 1: is really fascinating to me. You're talking about a company
Speaker 1: that was founded in nineteen o six and did not
Speaker 1: come out with the flagship product that everyone associates with
Speaker 1: it for more than four decades. It was really almost
Speaker 1: like essentially five decades before Xerox came out with a
Speaker 1: photocetic or electro setic copier and that was the point
Speaker 1: where they you is the term zerography and started to
Speaker 1: switch their company name from Halloid Corporation to Xerox. And
Speaker 1: that story alone was really interesting. That's what took up
Speaker 1: part one. So I guess the too long, didn't read
Speaker 1: version is right there, but you should go back and
Speaker 1: listen to part one. If you haven't already Part two.
Speaker 1: We're going to explore what happened in the wake of
Speaker 1: Xerox kind of finding its corporate identity as far as
Speaker 1: what its new product lines were going to be, and
Speaker 1: how it ended up having an interesting era of innovation
Speaker 1: while simultaneously not really capitalizing on it very well. And
Speaker 1: as it turns out, the story is big enough to
Speaker 1: require a part three. I really thought it was going
Speaker 1: to be a two parter. I set out to make
Speaker 1: a two parter, I swear to you, guys, But once
Speaker 1: I hit the late nineties, I realized there's just way
Speaker 1: too much stuff. I had started to summarize items, and
Speaker 1: I realized that the summaries, while they were accurate, didn't
Speaker 1: really give you a satisfying story. I mean, it just
Speaker 1: sounds like someone rattling off bullet points, and you guys
Speaker 1: deserve better than that. So instead of doing that, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna do even more research and do a Part three,
Speaker 1: because there's some really crazy stuff that went on at
Speaker 1: Xerox at the upper levels of management. I'm talking like
Speaker 1: cloak and dagger betrayals at the most senior levels of
Speaker 1: leadership at Xerox Company in the late nineties, So we're
Speaker 1: gonna explore that in part three. But now this is
Speaker 1: gonna be um. This is gonna be the calm before
Speaker 1: the storm. So it's not exactly like the Star Wars
Speaker 1: trilogy where you hit Empire strikes back and then everyone's
Speaker 1: at their lowest point. Now the lowest point is gonna
Speaker 1: happen sometime in part three. But don't worry. There will
Speaker 1: also be some form of resolution, but there won't be
Speaker 1: an ending because Xerox is still existing, and so we
Speaker 1: won't actually have a the end. We'll just have a
Speaker 1: the end question mark. When we last left our hero
Speaker 1: known as Xerox, the company had just started to experience
Speaker 1: serious revenue growth in the early nineteen sixties. The company
Speaker 1: had made its money on photographic paper products up to
Speaker 1: that point, but now had branched out by creating electro
Speaker 1: static copiers, which used the electro static charge to imprint
Speaker 1: paper with toner It used photo conductive materials selenium specifically,
Speaker 1: in order to do this. We will touch back on
Speaker 1: that in a little bit. And this was a much
Speaker 1: faster method than earlier technologies that would allow you to
Speaker 1: make copies, and the orders were pouring in from enterprises
Speaker 1: around the world. Enterprises as in big companies. That's what
Speaker 1: Xerox was targeting. They were looking at selling products to
Speaker 1: major companies, not to your individual consumers that was not
Speaker 1: really on their radar, and pretty much that was fueling
Speaker 1: Xerox's success. It was practically doubling their revenue every year
Speaker 1: for a few years, they started seeing those number go
Speaker 1: up dramatically year over year. That led to Fortune magazine
Speaker 1: to declare Xerox the most successful product ever marketed in America. Specifically,
Speaker 1: they were talking about the nine fourteen copier, so called
Speaker 1: because that was the dimensions of paper you could use
Speaker 1: in the machine, nine inches by fourteen inches. So yeah,
Speaker 1: they had gone from a modest, little photographic paper company
Speaker 1: to one of the biggest companies in America due to
Speaker 1: this incredibly popular and very profitable product. In nineteen sixty two,
Speaker 1: Xerox formed a joint venture with the Japanese photography company
Speaker 1: Fuji Photo Film Company, and this venture was called the
Speaker 1: Fuji Xerox Company Limited, and essentially it was formed so
Speaker 1: that they could distribute Xerox products in Japan and later
Speaker 1: it also served as a research and development platform. So
Speaker 1: Fuji and Xerox would work together doing R and D
Speaker 1: on various technologies. That same year, Xerox acquired University Microfilms.
Speaker 1: This was a small company founded by Eugene Power. It
Speaker 1: got its start preserving works from the British Museum and
Speaker 1: it was preserving them obviously on microfilm. As you would
Speaker 1: imagine based on the name. The company changed names a
Speaker 1: few times while it was under Xerox's ownership, but ultimately
Speaker 1: the company would sell off University Microfilms to another company
Speaker 1: called Bell and Howell in the nineteen eighties, and today
Speaker 1: University Microfilms is better known as pro Quest, so if
Speaker 1: you ever heard a pro Quest, it started off as
Speaker 1: University Microfilms and for a while it was owned by Xerox.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty three, Xerox acquired Electro Optical Systems, and
Speaker 1: that same year Xerox released the first desktop cop year
Speaker 1: called the Xerox eight thirteen, and like the nine fourteen,
Speaker 1: this was named by the dimensions of paper you could
Speaker 1: use in it. Unlike that larger nine fourteen, this one
Speaker 1: didn't sell nearly as well, and eventually the company would
Speaker 1: discontinue it decide that it would really just focus on
Speaker 1: developing those larger, high capacity copiers and leave the desktop
Speaker 1: market to other companies. For the most part, this would
Speaker 1: eventually come back to haunt them. Xerox also formed a
Speaker 1: joint venture with the Rank Organization, which was not a
Speaker 1: group of smelly people, but instead, the Rank Organization was
Speaker 1: a company out of the United Kingdom, was a film company.
Speaker 1: It's an entertainment conglomerate. And in the late nineteen forties
Speaker 1: the Rank Organization had hit on hard times. The leadership
Speaker 1: of the Rank Organization looked for ways to diversify their businesses.
Speaker 1: A purchased a radio station in nineteen forty nine, and
Speaker 1: they entered into this venture with the Halloid Slash Xerox
Speaker 1: Company in nineteen fifty six. Nine years later, in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty five, Rank Slash Xerox opening manufacturing plant in ven Ree,
Speaker 1: the Netherlands. And business is so weird, you guys. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of interesting and odd joint ventures in Xerox's past. Now,
Speaker 1: Joe Wilson, you may remember Joe Wilson as the son
Speaker 1: of the founder of the Halloyd Corporation. He was also
Speaker 1: the man who instilled a lot of his own personal
Speaker 1: values into the company that became kind of its mission statement.
Speaker 1: He stepped down as president of Xerox in nineteen sixty six.
Speaker 1: He kind of thought that once you started hitting sixty
Speaker 1: years old, you should really withdraw from leadership positions in
Speaker 1: the company, and that became a tradition at Xerox. As
Speaker 1: c e O s or presidents would start to hit sixty,
Speaker 1: they would typically resign and they would train up somebody
Speaker 1: to be their replacement. Uh. Kind of a scythe apprentice
Speaker 1: thing going on there, but you know less, sinister. Now.
Speaker 1: Wilson would remain the CEO of the company for another
Speaker 1: year until nineteen sixty seven, and he was chairman of
Speaker 1: the board until he passed away in nineteen seventy one
Speaker 1: at the age of sixty one years old. Wilson had
Speaker 1: imbued the company with a focus on innovation, as he
Speaker 1: had felt since he first started at the Halloy Company
Speaker 1: that sitting back and relying on an established business was
Speaker 1: a guaranteed path to failure in the long run. His
Speaker 1: successor in all three of his roles of President, CEO,
Speaker 1: and chairman was C. Peter McCullough. Now, a little bit
Speaker 1: more on Wilson is warranted, However, before we move on
Speaker 1: with the rest of the Xerox story. So Wilson had
Speaker 1: involved himself in numerous social causes. In his will, he
Speaker 1: willed more than twenty million dollars in cash and even
Speaker 1: more in stock options to the University of Rochester. Upon
Speaker 1: his death, the university actually closed down campus except for
Speaker 1: emergency services in the hospital, for two days of mourning
Speaker 1: in memory of Joe Wilson. He had spoken at a
Speaker 1: conference for a Council for Financial Aid to Education and
Speaker 1: the Academy of Political Science, and at that speech he
Speaker 1: said that quote businessmen and scientists have a moral imperi
Speaker 1: div to extend their technology to society end quote, and
Speaker 1: went on to say, quote, our technology has not lived
Speaker 1: up to its obligations to society. Technological companies are at
Speaker 1: the center of social change and therefore have a responsibility.
Speaker 1: Those in the inner city have derived little benefit from
Speaker 1: technology and no profit from it end quote. And I
Speaker 1: really think it's kind of remarkable that a successful businessman,
Speaker 1: he's a multi millionaire who came from a family of conservatives.
Speaker 1: He himself was a registered Republican, though he was certainly
Speaker 1: less of a conservative Republican than some of his family were,
Speaker 1: but he saw that there was this social responsibility on
Speaker 1: the part of successful business owners to contribute back to society.
Speaker 1: And I should also say that during this time the
Speaker 1: Republican Party was a little different than the modern Republican Party,
Speaker 1: but even so he had several more like Democratic Party
Speaker 1: leanings although he identified as Republican. His successor McCulla, whom
Speaker 1: Wilson chose, was in fact a registered Democrats. So Wilson
Speaker 1: also was able to rise above his own political beliefs
Speaker 1: and look at a person's contributions and say this is
Speaker 1: the right person for the job, even if they did
Speaker 1: not agree on everything politically, which I think is also
Speaker 1: very telling of Joe Wilson's character. Uh McCulloch was born
Speaker 1: in Canada. He was the son of the Director of
Speaker 1: Public Works for Canadian Parliament, and he attended the Harvard
Speaker 1: Harvard Business School and graduated with a degree. After serving
Speaker 1: in World War Two, he served in the British Navy
Speaker 1: briefly in the last year of World War Two. He
Speaker 1: had started back at nineteen fifty four at Halloyd as
Speaker 1: the general manager of the company's first reproduction service center
Speaker 1: in Chicago, and by nineteen fifty nine he had been
Speaker 1: named a general sales manager. In nineteen sixty he became
Speaker 1: the vice president for sales, and nineteen sixty one he
Speaker 1: was elected to the board of directors and he assumed
Speaker 1: the role of president in nineteen sixty six. So it
Speaker 1: was a pretty meteoric rise in the ranks, and like
Speaker 1: Joe Wilson, McCullough had a strong sense of social justice.
Speaker 1: He and Wilson had created an affirmative action program at
Speaker 1: the company, which continued under McCullough's leadership when he became
Speaker 1: president and CEO. This was really remarkable. Remember this is
Speaker 1: during the era of civil rights, when there was a
Speaker 1: lot of turmoil going on in the United States on
Speaker 1: these issues, and meanwhile the leadership of Xerox came out
Speaker 1: and said, we fully support trying to balance the scales
Speaker 1: to create a system that will promote equality at our company,
Speaker 1: which I think says a lot again about the leadership
Speaker 1: of the company at the time. Mccull and Wilson shared
Speaker 1: many of the same beliefs, including a strong reliance upon innovation,
Speaker 1: but many would say McCullough would take Xerox into a
Speaker 1: new direction and lead the company to unprecedented profit as
Speaker 1: well as steered into some stormy waters. In nineteen six
Speaker 1: s seven, in an effort to reduce waste and costs,
Speaker 1: Xerox began a new policy of recovering metals from used
Speaker 1: photo receptor drums. Remember this is the big drum inside
Speaker 1: of a photocopier that carries that electrostatic charge. Use light
Speaker 1: to negate that charge, and then you put toner. The
Speaker 1: towner adheres to any place where the light has not touched,
Speaker 1: and then a similarly charged piece of paper that actually
Speaker 1: carries a stronger charge than the drum does will pick
Speaker 1: up the toner, move through a pair of fusers. These
Speaker 1: are high temperature rollers, and then the ink or toner
Speaker 1: is fused onto the paper. Well, those those photo receptor
Speaker 1: drums had some hazardous materials two as part of them.
Speaker 1: I mean, it was just it required using some stuff
Speaker 1: that's pretty dangerous, including some heavy metals, which is not
Speaker 1: the kind of music nor the Ralph Boxhi film. It
Speaker 1: is instead, in fact actual heavy metals. Uh So the
Speaker 1: company had to purchase those regularly in order to make
Speaker 1: the photo receptor drums. Those are expensive and they're dangerous
Speaker 1: to ships. So by reclaiming some of those materials from
Speaker 1: older drums. The Xerox was able to reduce their reliance
Speaker 1: on new material, and they viewed that as both economical
Speaker 1: and environmentally friendly. In ninety eight, at the age of
Speaker 1: sixty two, Chester Carlson passed away. Now, if that name
Speaker 1: does not sound familiar, you haven't listened to part one,
Speaker 1: but if you did, you may remember he was the
Speaker 1: inventor of the electrostatic copier. His success was emblematic of
Speaker 1: the American dream. He worked for a printer when he
Speaker 1: was in high school. He received from his employer an
Speaker 1: old printing press that otherwise was going to be destroyed,
Speaker 1: and he used it to print a magazine for amateur chemists.
Speaker 1: He attended junior college and majored in chemistry before he
Speaker 1: transferred to the California Institute of Technology Caltech, in other words,
Speaker 1: and earned a degree in physics while he was there.
Speaker 1: When he graduated college, he did so just as the
Speaker 1: Great Depression was really taking its toll, and so his
Speaker 1: prospects were pretty grim. He worked in patent law, as
Speaker 1: I mentioned in the last episode, and he found himself
Speaker 1: frequently in need of making copies of material, and that's
Speaker 1: not an easy thing to do in the era before
Speaker 1: photo copiers. So Carlson, wishing to put his knowledge of
Speaker 1: physics and chemistry to use, wanted to solve that problem.
Speaker 1: I talked about how he did that in the last episode,
Speaker 1: so I'm not going to retread it here, but let's
Speaker 1: just say he ended up falling in with Halloyd, which later,
Speaker 1: of course became Xerox. This was after he had been
Speaker 1: turned away by twenty different companies that were uninterested in
Speaker 1: his ideas. Now, he earned millions of dollars from his invention,
Speaker 1: like a hundred fifty million dollars, which is already a
Speaker 1: huge amount of money before you adjusted for inflation. But
Speaker 1: he was also a philanthropist, and he gave away more
Speaker 1: than a hundred million dollars in his lifetime to charities
Speaker 1: and foundations. He was awarded numerous times for his contributions
Speaker 1: to business and science as well as for his philanthropy,
Speaker 1: and his passing was also marked with reverence and sorrow. Also,
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty eight, Xerox opened the Xerox Tower in Rochester,
Speaker 1: New York. Remember that was their headquarters. It's where the
Speaker 1: Wilsons were living when they founded Halloyd Corporation, which would
Speaker 1: later become Xerox, But just one year later, in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty nine, the new president and CEO McCullough, would lead
Speaker 1: the company in a new direction, literally by relocating the
Speaker 1: corporate headquarters to Stanford, Connecticut. By this time, the company
Speaker 1: was making one billion dollars in revenue and had been
Speaker 1: listed as one of the one largest corporations in the
Speaker 1: United States. McCullough was looking into the future and was
Speaker 1: imagining a world in which the offices of tomorrow wouldn't
Speaker 1: need paper at all. Everything would be stored in some
Speaker 1: other medium. And this probably sounds familiar to anyone who
Speaker 1: has gone through one of those big technological rollouts at
Speaker 1: a company where people are talking a big game early on, saying, Oh,
Speaker 1: it's gonna eliminate the need of ever having a print
Speaker 1: out or a piece of paper. You'll never have to
Speaker 1: touch it. I'm still waiting for that day. I'm still
Speaker 1: waiting for the paperless office. But Xerox's approach to this,
Speaker 1: initially at least, was to invest in existing companies. So
Speaker 1: to that end, Xerox made an enormous deal, some would
Speaker 1: say a truly disastrous one, with a computer company called
Speaker 1: Scientific Data Systems in nineteen sixty nine, and that acquisition
Speaker 1: deal costs Xerox nearly a billion dollars in stocks. Unfortunately
Speaker 1: for Xerox, that particular deal would not work out for
Speaker 1: the company. The computers, which were not meant for the
Speaker 1: general public, were difficult to sell. They were meant for
Speaker 1: scientific research and government organizations. By nineteen seventy five, Xerox
Speaker 1: executives realized that this division wasn't going anywhere, and they
Speaker 1: shut it all down. But that wouldn't be the only
Speaker 1: contribution Xerox would make to the world of computing. When
Speaker 1: we come back, we'll look at the R and D
Speaker 1: branch Xerox form that is responsible for how we interact
Speaker 1: with technology today. But first let's take a quick break
Speaker 1: to thank our sponsor. So we're up to nineteen seventy,
Speaker 1: which is when Xerox made a few other moves that
Speaker 1: would expand its influence, and one was the formation of
Speaker 1: the Xerox Computer Services Division as the company acquired other
Speaker 1: computer companies. The other big one was the formation of
Speaker 1: the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center or Park Facility p
Speaker 1: A r C in California. Park became an incredibly important
Speaker 1: R and D facility. The work going on there in
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies would later transform personal computers in the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties. Xerox Park opened on July one, nineteen seventy,
Speaker 1: and the whole purpose of this part of the company
Speaker 1: was to innovate new technologies. The focus at that time
Speaker 1: was on computing, which was the realm of scientific research centers, universities,
Speaker 1: big business, and the military. There were no such things
Speaker 1: as personal computers that early on. In fact, many computers
Speaker 1: had no digital or analog display. You had to rely
Speaker 1: on a lighted panel or read results that were printed
Speaker 1: out on long strings of paper tape. Because Park played
Speaker 1: such an important role in Xerox, I'm going to peel
Speaker 1: off from the main company for a bit and talk
Speaker 1: about what was going on over at Park before jumping
Speaker 1: back into the main company's timeline. So let's park it
Speaker 1: in Park for a bit. I don't feel good about that.
Speaker 1: In Park pioneered a method of printing a bitmapped electronic
Speaker 1: image on a zero graphic copyer drum using laser printing.
Speaker 1: Seems simple enough, no, but seriously, how the heck does
Speaker 1: that work? Was it even me? So? If you listen
Speaker 1: to the last episode and I hope you did. Otherwise,
Speaker 1: this show is really confusing to you. You learned about
Speaker 1: how photocopiers use light to create an electrostatic charge on
Speaker 1: a photo conductive drum. Laser printers follow a very similar principle.
Speaker 1: So you have a printer or a copier, inside of
Speaker 1: which is a rotating drum, a cylindrical piece of equipment
Speaker 1: that turns, it rotates around its axis, and near this
Speaker 1: rotating drum, which is photo conductive, that means that when
Speaker 1: light hits it, it can actually create conductivity. You can
Speaker 1: have electron movement through the material. Near it, you would
Speaker 1: have a wire. It's called a corona wire. It's not
Speaker 1: kind of beer, it's just that's what called a corona wire.
Speaker 1: You run uh an electrical current thread. You actually create
Speaker 1: a voltage through this wire, and this preps the drum
Speaker 1: as the drum rotates. The drum rotates near this high
Speaker 1: volt toge corona wire, and that ends up giving the
Speaker 1: rotating drum a charge. And now, for the purposes of
Speaker 1: this example, let's just say it's a positive charge. You
Speaker 1: could do this with a negative charge to everything would
Speaker 1: be reversed, but we're gonna say positive charge for this one.
Speaker 1: So you get a positive charge on the surface of
Speaker 1: this rotating drum. The laser beam would shine down onto
Speaker 1: this photo conductive drum as it rotates, drawing out the
Speaker 1: various letters and images that are supposed to be printed
Speaker 1: on the paper. It hits all the points that are
Speaker 1: supposed to be covered in toner. In other words, all
Speaker 1: the points that should show up as a positive image, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, having actual ink on it. The reaction between
Speaker 1: the laser and the photo conductive drum creates a negatively
Speaker 1: charged area on the drums surface. So think of it
Speaker 1: as painting the drums surface with light, and when you
Speaker 1: finish painting with light, there's an electro static charge there,
Speaker 1: and it's a negative charge. The lasers very narrow and
Speaker 1: it's very focused, so we can do this with really
Speaker 1: great precision. The printer then coats the drum and positively
Speaker 1: charged toner. Now we all remember cool Om's law, right,
Speaker 1: We all follow it whether we want to or not.
Speaker 1: Coulomb's law is that like charges oppose each other, and
Speaker 1: opposite charges attract. Just like Paul Abduel said, the positively
Speaker 1: charged areas of the drum, which were the ones that
Speaker 1: were not touched by the laser. Those repel the toner
Speaker 1: because the toner itself is also positively charged, and light
Speaker 1: charge repels like But the negatively charged sections, the ones
Speaker 1: that the laser actually drew upon, those attract toner. Ton
Speaker 1: or sticks to that part of the drum. So then
Speaker 1: the toner adheres to that part of the rotating drum
Speaker 1: as it goes around. Next comes the paper. Now the
Speaker 1: paper first will pass by a negatively charged corona wire.
Speaker 1: This imparts a very strong negative electrostatic charge to the
Speaker 1: paper itself, and the charge has to be stronger than
Speaker 1: the one that's on the rotating drum, because then whichever
Speaker 1: charge is strongest is going to pull the hardest at
Speaker 1: the toner. The toner is going to go which whichever
Speaker 1: one is the strongest. Think of the toner in this
Speaker 1: case as a rope in a in a game of
Speaker 1: tug of war, and the paper that's just gone past
Speaker 1: the corona wire is a big beefy dude, and the
Speaker 1: photo conductive drum is a not so strong dude. Or hey,
Speaker 1: let's say it's a big strong woman is the paper one,
Speaker 1: and the photo conductive dramas myself. Well, the strong woman
Speaker 1: is totally gonna win that game of tug of war.
Speaker 1: Let's just face it. She will. And the same thing
Speaker 1: is true with this particular scenario. The paper comes in,
Speaker 1: the electrostatic charge is stronger on the paper than it
Speaker 1: is on the drum. It then attracts all the toner
Speaker 1: onto the paper, and of course the toner is in
Speaker 1: the shape that was drawn by that laser, and that
Speaker 1: means all the words, all the images, everything is drawn
Speaker 1: out specifically the way the laser had it had moved
Speaker 1: across the surface of this drum. The paper then passes
Speaker 1: through a pair of high temperature rollers called the fusers.
Speaker 1: This melts the toner so that it fuses with the paper.
Speaker 1: The toner has these little plastic particles inside of it,
Speaker 1: and by melting it, that's what makes it stick to
Speaker 1: the paper, and it doesn't just brush off when it
Speaker 1: comes out, because otherwise you just have a electrostatically charged
Speaker 1: piece of paper and some electrostatically charged bits of toner,
Speaker 1: and then you know, a good shake would make all
Speaker 1: of that fall away. So it has to be melted
Speaker 1: to the surface of the paper for it to be
Speaker 1: fused there. And then the drum meanwhile continues its rotation
Speaker 1: and that rotation takes it past what is called a
Speaker 1: discharge lamp, and essentially that erases the drum and prepares
Speaker 1: it for the next electro static image. So the discharge
Speaker 1: lamp kind of sets it at zero. The next time
Speaker 1: the drama rotates past the corona wire, it will be
Speaker 1: prepared again with its positive charge, and the whole process
Speaker 1: can start all over. This, by the way, happens incredibly fast,
Speaker 1: which is why you can make lots and lots of
Speaker 1: copies in a short amount of time, because it's just
Speaker 1: constantly happening as the dramas rotating. It's actually pretty remarkable
Speaker 1: at how fast this can happen. When you think about
Speaker 1: it that it's it's redrawing new images or perhaps the
Speaker 1: same image over and over again. Uh, it's pretty incredible.
Speaker 1: So you can see that this is similar in many
Speaker 1: ways to the earlier form of zerography that they had
Speaker 1: pioneered in the fifties and sixties. The use of lasers
Speaker 1: allowed for more accurate and finally detailed copies, so you
Speaker 1: had an increase in quality. Back to the timeline. In
Speaker 1: nineteen two, researchers at Park developed the programming language small talk.
Speaker 1: This was an early example of an object oriented programming language.
Speaker 1: The language pioneered several features that would become standard elements
Speaker 1: of future programming languages. But i recently did a couple
Speaker 1: of episodes on the history of programming languages, so I'm
Speaker 1: not going to retread all of that here. You can
Speaker 1: go back and listen to it to learn more about
Speaker 1: programming languages, what they do, and how they evolved over time.
Speaker 1: Back at Xerox Park, in nineteen seventy three, they created
Speaker 1: the Alto. Now, the Alto was one of the first
Speaker 1: computers that could be said to fall into a personal
Speaker 1: computer category. But there's a big asterisk next to that,
Speaker 1: and that asterisk leads to a footnote, and that footnote
Speaker 1: says it was never really sold to the general public.
Speaker 1: Xerox didn't intend for those to go to the average consumer.
Speaker 1: They weren't looking at the average person as a potential customer. Instead,
Speaker 1: these computers were made for internal use at Park itself,
Speaker 1: so it became kind of a development platform people who
Speaker 1: were working on computer science projects where it would use
Speaker 1: the Alto as sort of the platform to build them.
Speaker 1: So these would be various user interfaces things like that.
Speaker 1: Alto was the tool that they would use to develop
Speaker 1: these things, but they never really thought, hey, we shouldn't
Speaker 1: make a version of this and sell it to people,
Speaker 1: because people will totally buy it. So researchers began working
Speaker 1: on projects that would one day find elements of those
Speaker 1: projects incorporated into consumer products, but most of those consumer
Speaker 1: products would be offered by other companies, not Xerox. In fact,
Speaker 1: that's one of the big problems Xerox faced later on,
Speaker 1: is that they made a lot of really useful stuff,
Speaker 1: but it turned out they didn't really make good leverage
Speaker 1: of it. Right, they invented it, but they didn't really
Speaker 1: bring it to market in a way that was meaningful.
Speaker 1: Other companies would just end up incorporating those ideas into
Speaker 1: their own designs and then they made all the bank
Speaker 1: off of it. For example, one of those early projects
Speaker 1: was a whizzy wig editor. Now, whizziwig stands for what
Speaker 1: you see is what you get, meaning you can see
Speaker 1: the thing you are editing and make changes to it
Speaker 1: with those changes immediately reflected on screen. So the way
Speaker 1: I usually described this is if you look at the
Speaker 1: early days of developing web pages, the only way you
Speaker 1: could really create a web page was using a text editor.
Speaker 1: And you would build the page out using HTML hypertext
Speaker 1: markup language. Typically you'd build out a page in code. Essentially,
Speaker 1: it's pretty simple code, but still code, so you'd build
Speaker 1: it out. You would save it, so you save a
Speaker 1: text file that has all this code in it. You
Speaker 1: would open up a browser. You would open up the
Speaker 1: language that you had just saved. The browser would interpret
Speaker 1: that as a web page and display it in front
Speaker 1: of you, and then you would look at it and
Speaker 1: you would say, yes, that's exactly what I want, or
Speaker 1: you might say this is terrible. Everything is misaligned. Nothing
Speaker 1: is the right color, the font is the wrong size,
Speaker 1: lots of different things could go wrong, at which point
Speaker 1: you would close out the browser. You would open up
Speaker 1: the text editor. You would go through the ht mL.
Speaker 1: You would try and find where you went wrong, and
Speaker 1: you would try and fix it, and then you would
Speaker 1: do it all over again. Save it, open up a browser,
Speaker 1: open up that code, see if it looks any better.
Speaker 1: It was a real trial and error process. It took
Speaker 1: a lot of time, whereas whizzy wig would just allow
Speaker 1: you to see what the page is supposed to look
Speaker 1: like from the beginning, and you can make those changes
Speaker 1: directly and see how it looks immediately and not have
Speaker 1: to do this start stop process that you would have
Speaker 1: to do otherwise. It's a pretty big leap. Now they
Speaker 1: were looking at whizzy Wig editors for all sorts of stuff,
Speaker 1: not web pages. Web Pages were not a thing back
Speaker 1: in the nineteen seventies. But I just used that as
Speaker 1: an example because it was something I have had personal
Speaker 1: experience with. I used to program web pages in HTML,
Speaker 1: and I couldn't do it today, It's been too long
Speaker 1: since i've I've done it, but it was painstaking and
Speaker 1: it was easy to make mistakes and hard to figure
Speaker 1: out where those mistakes were. So whizzy Wig was a
Speaker 1: big step up in making it more user friendly and
Speaker 1: easy to make changes to various types of documents. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: as other engineers were working on our pannet, which was
Speaker 1: the predecessor to the Internet, or a predecessor to the Internet,
Speaker 1: I should say, Xerox was pioneering ethernet networking, and this
Speaker 1: is a way of connecting hardware like printers and computers
Speaker 1: together in a local area network or land. It was
Speaker 1: a revolutionary idea at the time, and it would make
Speaker 1: a big impact as it spread beyond Xerox and something
Speaker 1: else that happened at Xerox Park involved an influx of
Speaker 1: new talent from another lab. That lab was the Stanford
Speaker 1: Research Institute Lab s r I, and there was a
Speaker 1: man there named Douglas ingle Bart who was working at
Speaker 1: s r I, and ingle Bart was a visionary and
Speaker 1: his work created the foundation for modern personal computer interface
Speaker 1: his Inglebart himself was not connected to Xerox Park. He
Speaker 1: didn't work for them, but several of his team did
Speaker 1: defect to Park in the nineteen seventies. Now, the reasons
Speaker 1: for that were multiple multiple in nature. There were some
Speaker 1: people who just found Inglebart's personality a bit much and
Speaker 1: they just found it difficult to work with them, so
Speaker 1: they wanted to work somewhere else. There were others who
Speaker 1: were just convinced that he had the wrong idea as
Speaker 1: far as where computers should go next. He had this
Speaker 1: kind of time sharing idea where multiple users would all
Speaker 1: take advantage of a very powerful machine, but no one
Speaker 1: would necessarily own it. You would have access to it.
Speaker 1: So this is similar to the way computer labs were
Speaker 1: working in universities at the time. But a lot of
Speaker 1: the people on his team thought that personal computers were
Speaker 1: the next big thing, and this was a fundamental disagreement
Speaker 1: in the philosophy of where computers were going, and so
Speaker 1: team members began to leave Inglebart's team, and they ended
Speaker 1: up some of them anyway joining Park. Now, all the
Speaker 1: ideas that Inglebart was putting forward included some pretty revolutionary
Speaker 1: ones for the time being, including things like a graphic
Speaker 1: user interface or gooey So Windows is an example of
Speaker 1: a graphic user interface, Windows based applications, meaning that you
Speaker 1: could actually have a window on your screen running some
Speaker 1: form of application, maybe it's a word processing program or
Speaker 1: something along those lines. Ingle Bart also created the computer mouse,
Speaker 1: or at least his team did, and he demonstrated those
Speaker 1: technologies and more at a big computer conference in the
Speaker 1: winter of nineteen sixty eight. Now that was two years
Speaker 1: before Xerox Park was founded, So again ingle Bart had
Speaker 1: had experience with this and was pioneering in this years
Speaker 1: before Xerox Park. The reason I make this point now
Speaker 1: is because some people will simplify the story and say
Speaker 1: that Xerox Park invented things like the computer mouse and
Speaker 1: the graphic user interface and word processing. That's not really true.
Speaker 1: A lot of that was pioneered at Stanford Research Institute.
Speaker 1: It's just that those team members eventually went over to
Speaker 1: Xerox Park, and it was Xerox Park that ended up
Speaker 1: becoming sort of ground zero for these ideas in Silicon Valley. Ah,
Speaker 1: but you couldn't You can trace it all the way
Speaker 1: back to Inglebart. The demonstration he did became known later
Speaker 1: on as the Mother of All demos, which tells you
Speaker 1: how much stuff he was actually showing off. Got this
Speaker 1: moniker due to having so many elements. Included that we're
Speaker 1: a brand new way of computing, and they were ideas
Speaker 1: that would end up having a massive impact on personal
Speaker 1: computering in general a couple of decades later. Uh. At
Speaker 1: the time, that industry didn't even really exist. So ingle
Speaker 1: Bart was showing off concepts like word processing, windowed functions,
Speaker 1: video conferencing, real time collaboration tools, which is pretty incredible
Speaker 1: stuff like you know what you might see with Google
Speaker 1: Docs today. Uh. He also showed off the computer mouse
Speaker 1: and navigation strategies used the computer mouse, and included a
Speaker 1: ton of stuff that would become intrinsic to computing over
Speaker 1: the next couple of decades. Well's team when they left
Speaker 1: ended up bringing that information over to Xerox Park, and
Speaker 1: so Xerox began to incorporate some of those same ideas
Speaker 1: into its Alto platform, But the Alto was still very
Speaker 1: much an internal product. It was not something made for
Speaker 1: the outside world, so the general public remained ignorant of this.
Speaker 1: Xerox was not very They weren't very communicative with what
Speaker 1: was going on at Park because the whole purpose of
Speaker 1: that division was to do research and development and to
Speaker 1: give Xerox a competitive advantage in the marketplace, so you
Speaker 1: wouldn't talk about this. The Alto, as it turns out,
Speaker 1: probably wouldn't have been a big hit even if it
Speaker 1: had been sold to consumers, largely because its stats were
Speaker 1: a little underwhelming for the time being. It was an
Speaker 1: interesting development tool, but not much more than that. I
Speaker 1: got a lot more to say about Xerox Park, but
Speaker 1: before I up into that, let's take another quick break
Speaker 1: and thank our sponsor. All Right, we're up to nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy four. The whizzy Wig editors get added functionality like
Speaker 1: cutting paste, so cutting paste became a thing in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy four. Apple on the iPhone would wait quite some
Speaker 1: time before incorporating it onto the iOS that's just me
Speaker 1: taking a swipe at Apple. It will not be the
Speaker 1: last time I do it. Park also created a word
Speaker 1: processing program in nineteen seventy four called Bravo, and in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy five Park showed off a graphic user interface
Speaker 1: or a gooey. Uh. This is a way of an
Speaker 1: interfacing with a computer where the graphics are representing different commands.
Speaker 1: So we think of just Windows or mac os that's
Speaker 1: essentially a gooey, or any real like smartphone in her
Speaker 1: face is a gooey. You would typically click on something
Speaker 1: or tap something in order to activate it. That's your
Speaker 1: basic graphic user interface navigation. But it really got start
Speaker 1: in the late sixties and early seventies. Uh. They also
Speaker 1: included uh, not just the icons that were representing different programs,
Speaker 1: but pop up menus and overlapping windows, so you could
Speaker 1: have multiple applications open on the same computer and you
Speaker 1: could navigate easily by clicking on the different windows. So
Speaker 1: these are basic things that would find their way into
Speaker 1: operating systems in the future, but they were really revolutionary
Speaker 1: back in the nineteen seventies, and you would use a
Speaker 1: mouse to navigate it. These were all refined elements that
Speaker 1: again were earlier found in Inglebart's work back at Stanford
Speaker 1: Research Institute. So I don't mean to suggest that the
Speaker 1: people at Xerox Park invented this. They took these ideas
Speaker 1: that had been initially developed at s r I, and
Speaker 1: they began to evolve them and innovate upon them and
Speaker 1: refine them. So uh, they were better implementations. Still not
Speaker 1: great implementations according to some people, but better than the
Speaker 1: proof of concept stuff from the nineteen sixties. And think
Speaker 1: for a moment about how transformative Inglebart's mouse was. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of work that Inglebart did that was
Speaker 1: incredibly impactful in the computer world, but the mouse is
Speaker 1: just one of those things that is so fundamental to
Speaker 1: our experience of computers these days that I wanted to
Speaker 1: take a moment to just think about how amazing it
Speaker 1: is that it even became a thing. It was just
Speaker 1: had such an enormous impact. It's a bit of a
Speaker 1: mind bender, really to think about moving a cursor on
Speaker 1: a screen. Typically it's a screen that's on our relatively
Speaker 1: vertical plane. Like you have a usually have a screen
Speaker 1: in front of you that is vertically aligned, so that
Speaker 1: it's standing up, you're looking straight ahead, you can see
Speaker 1: the cursor on there. Meanwhile, you are moving a device
Speaker 1: along a horizontal plane, like a desktop. So you're moving
Speaker 1: a device on the horizontal plane to manipulate a cursor
Speaker 1: that's on the vertical plane, and your brain just handles
Speaker 1: this pretty easily. A lot of people might have thought,
Speaker 1: just initially, without having experienced this, that it would be
Speaker 1: really difficult to pick up that you are moving something
Speaker 1: along one x y axis and meanwhile, ninety degrees removed
Speaker 1: from that x y axis, you're moving something else in
Speaker 1: order to control that. Uh. It just seems counterintuitive, but
Speaker 1: in fact it works really well, and so we're pretty
Speaker 1: lucky that our brains are capable of taking on this challenge.
Speaker 1: On most days. Anyway, I'm just speaking for myself here,
Speaker 1: there are some days where even operating a mouse is
Speaker 1: particularly challenging to me. In n a young entrepreneur negotiated
Speaker 1: a special visit to Xerox Park. Now this was highly
Speaker 1: out of the ordinary because the work at park was
Speaker 1: pretty hush hush. I mean, it was not quite a
Speaker 1: skunk works, but it was almost that quiet. So getting
Speaker 1: a visit, especially when you are in charge of a
Speaker 1: company that could theoretically compete with Xerox was a big deal.
Speaker 1: This young businessman offered up a significant share in his
Speaker 1: young company before it was going to have its own
Speaker 1: initial public offering or i p O. That's when you
Speaker 1: create a company and you make it publicly traded so
Speaker 1: people can purchase stocks. So essentially, this young entrepreneur comes
Speaker 1: to Xerox park and says, I really want to take
Speaker 1: a look at what you're doing in there, and they said,
Speaker 1: it's not really what we're comfortable with. And he says, well,
Speaker 1: I got this company over here, it's about to go public,
Speaker 1: and I can totally cut you guys a huge deal
Speaker 1: and give you a whole bunch of stock in this
Speaker 1: brand new company before it goes public, and then you'll
Speaker 1: just end up being able to see lots of profit
Speaker 1: as my company is incredibly successful. Now. For a lot
Speaker 1: of companies, they would have said, hey, go pound sand
Speaker 1: get out of here, you bother in me. But Xerox
Speaker 1: said all right, and they accepted this young entrepreneurs deal.
Speaker 1: That young man was Steve Jobs, and his company was,
Speaker 1: of course Apple Computer, and Jobs was really impressed by
Speaker 1: the demonstration of Xerox's technologies, many of which again originated
Speaker 1: with Inglebart's team way back at Stanford Research Institute. And
Speaker 1: while Jobs was convinced that Xerox was never really going
Speaker 1: to do anything with that in the consumer space, he
Speaker 1: just didn't think that their version of it was a
Speaker 1: really good version. He did think the ideas were astounding
Speaker 1: and important. He was certain he could take those same
Speaker 1: ideas and make an incredible machine. So he went back
Speaker 1: to Apple and immediately began to incorporate those features into
Speaker 1: a new design for the upcoming Macintosh computer. If you
Speaker 1: listen to my episodes about the history of the Macintosh,
Speaker 1: you'll remember how much turmoil Jobs decisions caused. It's ultimately
Speaker 1: culminated in Jobs as forced exit from his own company.
Speaker 1: But that's a story we've already told, so I'm not
Speaker 1: going to retread it here. Just go back and listen
Speaker 1: to the history of the Macintosh and you'll hear how
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs, once he got all these great ideas, totally
Speaker 1: took over the Macintosh design process and through the whole
Speaker 1: project into disarray, arguably for the better, but certainly in
Speaker 1: the short term. It was very tumultuous over at Apple Computers.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty, Park would develop magneto optical storage devices
Speaker 1: which could store data on them, but we're not erasable,
Speaker 1: so once you wrote data to the disc, that was it.
Speaker 1: It was gonna be there forever until the disc was destroyed,
Speaker 1: and this would eventually find its way into a commercial
Speaker 1: product and would spawn off a spinoff company called optimim.
Speaker 1: In two, Park created the first fiber optics based local
Speaker 1: area network, which is pretty incredible. Fiber optics are super cool,
Speaker 1: and we've done a tech stuff episode on those in
Speaker 1: the past. I want to say that that was one
Speaker 1: that Chris Pallette and I did many years ago. So
Speaker 1: if you do the search on the RSS feed for
Speaker 1: fiber optics, it should pop up. In nineteen eight six,
Speaker 1: Park introduced the world to multi beam lasers, which would
Speaker 1: be used in various printing systems to create an even
Speaker 1: faster experience for customers. Again, those customers were, for the
Speaker 1: most part, big corporations. Xerox still wasn't terribly interested in
Speaker 1: making products for the average person. Seven saw Part create
Speaker 1: a sixteen bit coding system for characters in order to
Speaker 1: allow computers to represent text in any language. So there
Speaker 1: are a lot of different languages with different alphabets, right,
Speaker 1: sort of like alphabet, and you've got the standard of
Speaker 1: English alphabet, You've got lots of different versions. You've got
Speaker 1: various European alphabets that have characters that are not found
Speaker 1: in English. We don't have too many oomblouts over here
Speaker 1: in the English language, for example, or various excit grav
Speaker 1: or excit you so uh. This was a way of
Speaker 1: encoding all those different characters and making sure that they
Speaker 1: had representation on computers so that computers could display and
Speaker 1: ultimately and interpret this kind of text. This would eventually
Speaker 1: be developed into a standard later called Unicode. In nineteen
Speaker 1: Xerox Park sort of predicted the Internet of things. Now.
Speaker 1: Back in those days, it was called ubiquitous computing, and
Speaker 1: it really referred to the way that computers could be
Speaker 1: integrated into more elements of our lives, such as our
Speaker 1: vehicles and personal devices. Park also worked with some early
Speaker 1: mobile device designs at the time, although if you were
Speaker 1: to compare them to today's mobile devices, they look super clunky,
Speaker 1: but they were really forward thinking. Xerox was saying, you know, eventually,
Speaker 1: we're going to have these little computer like devices that
Speaker 1: are going to be very important in how we interact
Speaker 1: with the world. I'm sure that it was even pretty
Speaker 1: modest compared to what we can do today with our
Speaker 1: smart devices, but still it was showing that they were
Speaker 1: thinking ahead and yet still not really capitalizing on it
Speaker 1: in any sort of consumer or commercial way. In ninete
Speaker 1: Park researchers helped work on the protocols and standards for
Speaker 1: the implementation of the Internet. Now, the Internet was already
Speaker 1: a thing by It's not like it was brand new,
Speaker 1: but it was just starting to become something that the
Speaker 1: mainstream public was aware of. Ninety two is still pretty
Speaker 1: early for the mainstream public. A lot of people who
Speaker 1: knew about the Internet were folks who were in college
Speaker 1: because a lot of universities had Internet labs, and of
Speaker 1: course the Worldwide Web was just getting started in ninety two,
Speaker 1: so it wasn't like it was widely understood at that point.
Speaker 1: In two thousand, Park developed a flexible digital document display
Speaker 1: tech that they called electronic Reusable Paper, and Park would
Speaker 1: create a spinoff company called Gyra Coon Media to commercialize
Speaker 1: this e paper product. A decade later, in two thousand two,
Speaker 1: zero X would spin off Park and it would become
Speaker 1: an independent subsidiary. So Park still exists, but it is
Speaker 1: not Xerox Park anymore. It's kind of its own independent
Speaker 1: research and development company. Now, there's still a lot to
Speaker 1: say about Xerox itself. While Park was working on these
Speaker 1: new innovations, the company continued to make products, mostly again
Speaker 1: for the enterprise consumerteen copier that put Xerox on the
Speaker 1: map boasted a seventy percent profit margin because of the
Speaker 1: amount it costs to make one versus the amount that
Speaker 1: Xerox could charge companies to buy it. So Xerox was
Speaker 1: making a seventy profit on every sale of one of
Speaker 1: these copiers. It was retired in the early nineteen seventies
Speaker 1: because eventually they just had too many other products that
Speaker 1: were faster, more efficient than the nine fourteen. But it
Speaker 1: did show that Xerox had a very strong incentive for
Speaker 1: going after those enterprise customers be because that's where the
Speaker 1: profit was. You didn't have to produce nearly as much
Speaker 1: product to make a huge amount of money, because if
Speaker 1: you're making a profit margin, then it's all right if
Speaker 1: you have fewer sales per year, because you're making more
Speaker 1: money per sale than you would if you were using
Speaker 1: something else. It's one of the reasons why Xerox was
Speaker 1: so reluctant to move into other markets like the consumer marketplace.
Speaker 1: It just made more sense financially to continue developing for
Speaker 1: the enterprise, so it could have pivoted to aim at consumers.
Speaker 1: But why would you unless you happen to have enough
Speaker 1: foresight to say things are not going to stay the
Speaker 1: same forever. And I thought this was really going to
Speaker 1: be a two partter, like I said the beginning, but
Speaker 1: it turns out the story is just too big. So
Speaker 1: in our next episode, I'm going to finish out the
Speaker 1: Xerox story. And there's some complicated things that happened in
Speaker 1: that timeline that we're gonna need to look into. For example,
Speaker 1: we'll learn what happened to the company as a result
Speaker 1: of it focusing on those high price commercial machines and
Speaker 1: the trouble the organization got into when serious competition that
Speaker 1: market popped up. Here's a bit of a spoiler for that.
Speaker 1: You had a lot of companies in Japan that we're
Speaker 1: starting to make photo copiers. There were other big competitors
Speaker 1: that that the Xerox company was looking at, including Kodak, IBM, Cannon.
Speaker 1: But the real problem where these smaller Japanese companies that
Speaker 1: were able to make photo copiers and sell them at
Speaker 1: much lower prices than Xerox. They were undercutting the Xerox sales.
Speaker 1: Xerox went from having a n share in the market
Speaker 1: near a near monopoly, it was practically a monopoly in
Speaker 1: photo copiers to going down to below fient in just
Speaker 1: a few years. Now, how did that happen? Why the
Speaker 1: precipitous fall that's going to be the focus of part
Speaker 1: three of the Xerox Story. What exactly happened to make
Speaker 1: the company have such a rough time him? And what
Speaker 1: is the crazy power struggle that happened at the very
Speaker 1: top levels of Xerox, And why did it come about?
Speaker 1: Why did Xerox hire a CEO and then fire that
Speaker 1: CEO just a year later? What was going on? That's
Speaker 1: gonna be the focus of the next one. That's as
Speaker 1: that's as good of a cliffhanger as I can leave
Speaker 1: you with with the Xerox Story Part two. We'll tune
Speaker 1: in next time with the Xerox Story Part three, and
Speaker 1: we will conclude this story and then we'll move on
Speaker 1: to other topics. And meanwhile, let's say that you've got
Speaker 1: a suggestion for a future episode topic and it's just
Speaker 1: burning a little hole in your brain and you want
Speaker 1: to stop it because that hurts and the smells distracting,
Speaker 1: then send it to me. I'll deal with the burning
Speaker 1: brain problem. Just write me an email. The email addresses
Speaker 1: tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you
Speaker 1: can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter to
Speaker 1: handle it. Both of those is text of h s W.
Speaker 1: You can also watch me record this show live on
Speaker 1: Wednesdays and Friday's. That's over at twitch dot tv slash
Speaker 1: tech Stuff. You can just go over there. You'll see
Speaker 1: the schedule of when I record. I love chatting with
Speaker 1: you guys and hanging out before and after the show
Speaker 1: and during the ad breaks as well, so you can
Speaker 1: have a real time discussion more or less with me.
Speaker 1: It's not quite real time, there's like a ten second delay,
Speaker 1: but apart from that, as real time as it gets.
Speaker 1: So I hope to see you there and I'll talk
Speaker 1: to you again really soon for more on this and
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Speaker 1: Com