Xerox

Xerox Holdings Corporation (/ˈzɪərɒks/, ZEER-oks) is an American corporation that sells printers, digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox was the pioneer of the photocopier market, beginning with the introduction of the Xerox 914 in 1959, so much so that the word xerox is commonly used as a synonym for photocopy. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut, though it is incorporated in New York with its largest group of employees based around Rochester, New York, where the company was founded. As a large developed company, it is consistently placed in the list of Fortune 500 companies.

The company purchased Affiliated Computer Services for $6.4 billion in early 2010. On December 31, 2016, Xerox separated its business process service operations, essentially those operations acquired with the purchase of Affiliated Computer Services, into a new publicly traded company, Conduent. Xerox focuses on its document technology and document outsourcing business, and traded on the NYSE from 1961 to 2021, and the Nasdaq since 2021.

Researchers at Xerox and its Palo Alto Research Center invented several important elements of personal computing, such as the desktop metaphor GUI, the computer mouse and desktop computing. The concepts were adopted by Apple Inc. and later Microsoft.

Xerox was founded in 1906 in Rochester, New York, as the Haloid Photographic Company. It manufactured photographic paper and equipment.

In 1938, Chester Carlson, a physicist working independently, invented a process for printing images using an electrically charged photoconductor-coated metal plate and dry powder "toner". However, it would take more than 20 years of refinement before the first automated machine to make copies was commercialized, using a document feeder, scanning light, and a rotating drum.

Joseph C. Wilson, credited as the "founder of Xerox", took over Haloid from his father. He saw the promise of Carlson's invention and, in 1946, signed an agreement to develop it as a commercial product. Wilson remained as President/CEO of Xerox until 1967 and served as chairman until his death in 1971.

Looking for a term to differentiate its new system, Haloid hired a Greek scholar at Ohio State University and coined the term xerography from two Greek roots meaning "dry writing". Haloid changed its name to Haloid Xerox in 1958 and then Xerox Corporation in 1961.

Before releasing the 914, Xerox tested the market by introducing a developed version of the prototype hand-operated equipment known as the Flat-plate 1385. The 1385 was not actually a viable copier because of its slowness of operation. As a consequence, it was sold as a platemaker for the Addressograph-Multigraph Multilith 1250 and related sheet-fed offset printing presses in the offset lithography market. It was little more than a high quality, commercially available plate camera mounted as a horizontal rostrum camera, complete with photo-flood lighting and timer. The glass film/plate had been replaced with a selenium-coated aluminum plate. Clever electrics turned this into a quick-developing and reusable substitute for film. A skilled user could produce fast, paper and metal printing plates of a higher quality than almost any other method. Having started as a supplier to the offset lithography duplicating industry, Xerox now set its sights on capturing some of offset's market share.