Hacker Culture A to Z

Chapter 24. X

Xbox

See “Microsoft”

Xerox

Most people think of Xerox as a company that makes photocopiers, but it has had a profound influence in the history of computing.

Xerox was founded in 1906 as the Haloid Company, a producer of photographic paper. In 1942, its founder, Chester Carlson, patented his electrophotography technique, which was later renamed xerography. It’s the technological foundation of photocopier document imaging, and in 1958, the company rebranded as the Haloid Xerox Company. It introduced the first xerographic photocopier the following year.

Since that novel invention was the catalyst for Xerox’s success, the company prioritized research and development, launching its Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) in 1970. PARC’s mission was to create “the office of the future.” And indeed it did, even though the company accidentally let competitors profit from its efforts.

Douglas Englebart spent much of the 1960s developing new technology for DARPA at the Stanford Research Institute, and in 1968 he presented the most groundbreaking prototype ever, known as the “Mother of All Demos.” It featured ideas that seemed bizarre at the time but are now mainstays of our modern lives: graphical user interfaces (GUIs), the computer mouse, and a hypertext-based computer network (the basic functionality of what later became the web).

The Xerox Alto computer, the first completely usable computer with a GUI and mouse, was launched at Xerox PARC in 1973, but never commercially ...