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Originally founded as The Haloid Photographic Company, Xerox started out making photographic equipment.
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The the first plain paper photocopier, the Xerox 914, comes to prominence as one of the most successful products ever. In 1961, the company changed its name to the Xerox Corporation in response to its success. Within a decade, Xerox was a Fortune 500 company.
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McColough wanted to see Xerox become the biggest supplier of information-intensive office equipment. Jacob Goldman built a new laboratory within the corporate research organization to provide the company with the technology necessary to realize the vision.
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Palo Alto Research Center, known as Xerox PARC, opens with a world-class team of experts designing an information intensive "Office of the Future". They wanted to move from analog office technologies to digital ones.
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An antitrust action was filed by the Federal Trade Commission in 1972 and settled in 1975. The settlement forced Xerox to license its critical patents, one result was they couldn't control all copier production.
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The first Object-Oriented Programming language (a type language which is a popular standard today) enables program improvement without rewrites. Revolutionizes software development and programming systems.
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Xerox PARC prototypes Alto, the world’s first personal computer. The first "what-you-see-is-what-you-get" editor, commercial use of a mouse, and graphical user interface (GUI). All of these developments are expected features of personal computers today.
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Xerox PARC terms its cut-and-paste bitmap editor as a "WYSIWYG", an important term today. Xerox also demos Bravo, the word-processing program that eventually leads to Microsoft Word.
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Xerox PARC debuts the first graphical user interface (GUI), with many features still in popular use today: icons, pop-up menus, overlapping windows and simple point-and-click.
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The first spin-off tech companies were created from Xerox innovations: 3Com, VLSI, and GRiD. This was the beginning of a pattern for Xerox, which has spun-off many more companies since.
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Since 1979, many researchers for Xerox left to start or join tech companies founded to commercialize Xerox's discoveries. In 1998, there were 35 "technology spin-offs" that came from the xerox research center. Many Xerox spin-offs are still very active and successful, such as Adobe.
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Xerox's market share was cut in half going from 82 percent to 41 percent, which prompted organizational changes. Called "Leadership Through Quality", the change would focus on improving customer satisfaction with their products. This was to compete with other office suppliers like IBM, Kodak, and Canon.
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Spencer was promoted to run Xerox PARC and had new ideas for how to manage their research. He liked to use spin-off companies to gently end research projects that had become obsolete by creating new companies to commercialize the discoveries.
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the two-millionth copier is produced
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A notebook-sized PARCPad. A lightweight document reader and precursor to wireless infrastructure. It was the first real attempt at making "ubiquitous computing" a reality.
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Xerox was the first printing company to create a blue laser for printing, which allowed for much higher-resolution printouts.
