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Supercharg3d
book

Supercharg3d

by Len Pannett
March 2019
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
256 pages
7h 11m
English
Wiley
Content preview from Supercharg3d

CHAPTER FOURAccessing 3D Printing Capabilities

In the 2007 TV series Mad Men about the growth and evolution of a 1960s advertising agency, there is an episode centered around the arrival of the company's first business Xerox photocopier. As depicted in the show, this was a significant moment for any company at the time, when it could begin to do work in-house, freeing itself from the need to send out copying jobs to a third party or use the prevalent, solvent-rich Gestetner copying (aka ditto) machines. The early business photocopiers, which had first gone on the market in the 1950s, were large, cumbersome and, above all, required a significant capital investment. In the 1960s and 1970s, sales volumes in photocopying companies like Xerox grew steadily—indeed, that company's brand became the byword for photocopying itself. Over that time, clients bought increasingly more photocopiers, which also became more capable and more expensive. However, toward the end of the 1970s, sales began to wane. Why?

Businesses that had acquired their own photocopiers had essentially overspent—there was more capability, more capacity, than they needed in their machines. The result was that they didn't need to continually upgrade, and thus they cut back on spending, leaving photocopier manufacturers contemplating how to restore their previous rising revenues with new approaches. They came up with a solution in the 1980s: no longer would they rely on sales of large-scale photocopiers. Instead, they ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781119532354Purchase book