There was a time when we ‘Xerox’-ed things and not Googled it. Xerox was a company nobody thought could fail. Sadly, it has. On January 31, Fujifilm of Japan bought a controlling stake in Xerox, which according to Bloomberg, has a market value of $8.3 billion. As the agreement marks the end of independence for a US company, we look back at five ‘xerox’ moments.

The Apple heist

In 1970, Xerox founded the Palo Alto Research Company (PARC) with the objective of coming up with innovations that the company could monetise. It obviously attracted a lot of attention, especially of one promising young man at the helm of a young company — Apple’s Steve Jobs. In 1979, he was given access to see the Alto computer which was developed at Xerox PARC (a research and development company). What happened in the coming years was, well... read on! 
Jobs was amazed by the demonstration of a new three-button computer mouse. It was clunky. It was expensive. Yet, it was amazing. During the demonstration, with just a click of a button, “windows” opened and closed. Using the word-processing programme was simple. In other words, there was enough to excite Jobs, the man who in 1996 said: “Picasso had a saying — ‘Good artists copy; great artists steal’ — and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.” The result? Apple introduced the Lisa PC which had many of the features of the Alto. This remains one of the greatest heists in tech history.

Please, not a verb!

The former chief book critic of The New York Times Michiko Kakutani had written a profile of actress Pat Carroll in 1979. The Crazy Like a Fox actress’ home was described as one “filled with books by Stein and about Stein, as well as xeroxed Ph.D. theses and obscure literary journals”. Nothing wrong with the sentence there? Not for the then Xerox field market analyst Maggie Lovaas, who sent a letter to the editor: “There is no adjective ‘xeroxed’.... If in the future you wish to use the name Xerox, it should be used with a capital ‘X’ and no ‘ed’.” The Times agreed. ‘Photocopy’ was the way forward.

So what if you’re Salman?

The Sohail Khan-directed Jai Ho (2014) wanted to board the ‘Zandu balm’ (Munni badnaam) and Fevicol (Fevicol se) wagon with a song called ‘Xerox’. Everything was smooth until someone on Sohail’s team pointed out that Salman Khan and team couldn’t dance to ‘Xerox’ because the Norwalk, Connecticut, company is very particular about brand-related issues. What we got is Himesh Reshammiya delivering Photocopy.

Pentagon Papers

History about the Pentagon Papers (an important stash of classified Vietnam War documents) has been refreshed in the Steven Spielberg-directed film, The Post, featuring Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep, in which US military analyst Daniel Ellsberg and “whistleblower” Anthony Russo used a Xerox machine to copy the papers. Ellsberg wrote in Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers in 2002: “It could do only one page at a time, and it took several seconds to do each page.” But look at the results!

Butt seriously

Mad magazine has always been parody gold. In the April 1997 issue, the magazine ran ‘Joey Buttafuoco’ s Guide to Chivalry’, which The Washington Post labelled “nastier”, “dirtier” and “riskier”. The cover had the magazine’s fictitious mascot Alfred E. Neuman with his pants down and his naked butt on a Xerox machine spewing copies of his grinning face.

TIMELINE

1906: Xerox was founded as The Haloid Photographic Company. It originally manufactured photographic paper and equipment.
1938: Haloid came up with the term ‘xerography’. (Above) This is the first xerographic copy ever made, created by physicist-inventor Chester Carlson in 1938.
1958: Haloid changed its name to Haloid Xerox and then Xerox Corporation in 1961.
1973: The company gave the world the Alto personal computer, with a mouse for input.
1990: Xerox document processing revenue was $13.6 billion. 
January 31, 2018: Japan’s Fujifilm announced it was taking a controlling stake in Xerox.

What’s the craziest thing you have xeroxed? Tell t2@abp.in