The old Xerox 914 copier tucked into a small alcove on the second floor of Xerox Square barely shows its age, with a few flecks of rust on the table-sized piece of beige office equipment.Fifty years ago this fall, Rochester-based Haloid Xerox launched the 914, which made photocopying cheap, easy and ubiquitous. And its subsequent success helped make what is now known as Xerox Corp. — a Connecticut-based Fortune 500 firm that employs close to 7,000 in the Rochester area and 54,000 worldwide.On Friday, Xerox CEO Ursula Burns will host a reunion of retirees involved with the 914 at the company's Webster campus, marking that anniversary.The company unveiled the product at a New York City trade show on Sept. 16, 1959, and then began turning out the 600-pound pieces of equipment from a factory on Orchard Street on Rochester's northwest side, with the first reaching customers in early 1960.And the story of the 914 has become stuff of business-class curricula and the 2004 history book Copies in Seconds: How a Lone Inventor and an Unknown Company Created the Biggest Communication Breakthrough Since Gutenberg.And while Wilson had shopped the technology around to such potential investors as IBM, most indications were that demand for such a product would be slim at best.
- News source: democratandchronicle
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