[Music] [Applause] [Music] and I'm Peter noxee and I'm from Bay Area Computer History perspectives and that's just two of us that's me and Gina tricot uniquely raise your hand Gina tricot and Jeannie is the piece of computer history herself since she was the park more than twenty years ago I come more recently to just an interest in computer history so we've been holding these talks since 1993 I see two of the speakers at our very first talk George Michael and Norm Hardy here in the second row that was that was one of the smaller talks at the very beginning was just an audience of twenty that we had in the audience Gordon Bell and Donald Knuth sitting side-by-side in the front row so it was a distinguished audience we've kept up our distinguished character I think ever since this is the first program since March a year ago when we had Ivan Sutherland and Bob sprout talk on the early history of virtual reality so Jeannie and I have taken a year off so to speak while the Computer History Museum people have been very busy trucking over the 50 tons of equipment that you're going to see later and for our program tonight we'll have Gary Starkweather talking on the development of the laser printer at Parc we had hoped to have a joint program with Ron Ryder - who was also involved in the early development of the laser printer but he's traveling constantly and unavailable okay was that Gary I think you already wired my upon volume great thanks before I get started I guess the one thing is interesting is that this this project even though it there were times when I wondered what in the world I was thinking of when I do to do this probably was more fun than anyone has a right to expect like all good things you set out to discover one thing and you discover something else which is even more exciting in order to cover this the right way here it's certainly critical I think this would not have been possible had it not been for xerography and of course I had the good fortune to years out of college to move to Rochester and the first company I worked for was Bausch and Lomb which was an optical company not an ophthalmic company at the time and I either considered Bausch and Lomb the lowest peak industrial job or the highest-paid graduate school I ever was at and there was kind of somewhere in between not unlike where I work now Apple watch and long had a layoff and I was in a group of 16 people 14 of which got the ax I was one of those spared probably considered me too naive to worry about so they let me go they could let me stay fortunately a bunch of the people went to Xerox and Xerox was a start-up when I got a job offer to go to Xerox the rule was why would you go to a place that's making copiers everyone knows they make four or five thousand of those things the markets full so why would you know there's no future to that place and so I said well there's no future here I might as well try two places without futures I guess it's a really safer so I went to Xerox and of course the key to Xerox would since Iran Rafi if you're in the general world when you talk about this process it's called perhaps more generally electrophotography but I'm permanently wired to Xero Griffey you after 24 years at Xerox that kind of happens and so basically comes from dry writing the beauty of it is is that it's a remarkable process and I just wanted to give credit to a few people here you have on the Left John des our who was head of R&D at Xerox Chester Carlson just a wonderfully decent guy and Joe Wilson an entrepreneur is entrepreneur if there ever was one so there's a picture of Joe with the first 914 copier in fact let me I think there's one picture before that here they're going to get it back and reverse ok nothing really likes to jump here we go so here's Joe with the 914 interesting thing the 914 was a seven-page for a minute copier filled with relays it sounded something like a chrysler fluid drive shifting when I made the copies those of you might remember what that was like and there we go I'm careful I won't screw with it the interesting thing about the 914 from which this whole company arose and how I got there and did this stuff is that the this must be a gremlin than this thing somewhere here I wonder if it is on automatic okay I'll be real careful of this thing this is the most profitable product ever produced in the world the 914 and it's it's in the Smithsonian I think with that particular situation against it I think it cost something in the neighborhood of five million dollars to develop and the revenue is absolutely enormous that this machine generated an interesting little story for anyone who's ever done inventions when Joe showed this machine off he put a original on the platen audience is filled with investors push the button to make a copy and the first sheet comes up blank okay he's gone oh my gosh somebody tapped him on the shoulder from behind the curtain and said turn it over he placed the original printed side up so the technology work so you have to be a little careful about some of this stuff now this was some of the early headquarters this is July in Rochester for those who have ever lived there so it got started in this little building grew into the Xerox Corporation and a number of good things got going from there I'm gonna take you through that whole litany but one of the things we've developed by a fella by the name of Roy lar and this is in 1964 Roy came up with this thing called the mobile printer and it was something that sat on the seat of your of a car originally intended for maybe for police and fire plugged into the cigarette lighter for power and with drag electrodes across a sheet of coated paper and develop it with toner so you could actually using FM radio transmit information to this printer it was considered to have no future and hence was shut down this is 1964 now doing electronic printing anyway this was was a remarkable device for its time perhaps one of the neatest project Xerox ever had was something called long distance serigraphy and this is kind of where my story came in long-distance iographer was a way to try and do fax only before it was called that I guess and what they did was the following see if we you had the system whereby you had a document drum in which the original was wrapped on to it a CRT which would line scan across the document pick up the reflected signals for the detector send them over a fifty six kilowatt hour T which was then modulated in proportion of those signals and would write on a zero graphic drum to make a copy at a distance and this was actually a great idea except the CRTs almost had to be water cooled they hadn't pushed right to the limit to make this work that just happened to be one of those wonderful things Mother Nature's designed light sources and photo sensors to kind of kind of be stretched to the limit in the way that they worked so basically it went back and forth on this raster with the CRT that the drum was doing the vertical motion in this thing and it was about a hundred and forty dots per inch the technology was capable being pushed to 300 see if this skipped one here but I can't let this thing get ruined okay any least missed one again here and I just go back [Applause] okay this is a room full of these things or not a whole lot of customers but what they actually did in this particular area was Southern Pacific Railway and what they did is they stick one of these things out the window and scan the bills of lading as the freight cars would go by in a distribution yard classification yard and then it could print out the bills of lading and keep the rolling stock going right on through the biggest problem with this thing was no light you couldn't speed it up and it was doomed to probably three or four pages per minute you might get it up to six but it just wasn't gonna make it very far there were a whole project started xerox using light pipes well at about this time i'm in graduate school working at Xerox and of course along came this thing called the laser now those of you who ever used early lasers you had to get a hand radio license to run them and to peak the plate and dip the grid and everything else to get these things to light there was really no on switch on this thing it was like a Class A amplifier so the model was could we substitute if I could paint with a laser there was one simple thing in a flying spot system its brightness of the light source that counts not the total power and of course a simple calculation on a laser you say sings 10,000 times a bar during the CRT just got to be wonderful the only trouble is lifetimes were 200 hours and so forth so I got this idea to trying to replace the CRTs with lasers to do the facsimile in a 1967 took a 914 and put a scanner I'm actually did the laser facsimile from the 914 discovered all the wonderful problems that go with doing that and then got the idea wouldn't it be neat to print with this thing now of course this is in the day in which a kilobyte of memory was considered a treasure indeed so if you do the calculations you say a million bits you're gonna put down what you're gonna do with that where you gonna get that kind of memory so Xerox by this point in time had developed a higher speed machine called the 2400 that was a 40-page for a minute copier because all this has a very interesting story that gets woven in about this time I was starting to get a lot of flack at Xerox for working on this project because it didn't look like a copier I mean that's just like yeah have trouble in any company for not making things like they're selling you're immediately suspect and so this you know what I was working on with lasers didn't make copies so were you working on that stuff for and so around this point in time something wonderful happened I picked up the company newsletter and there was a research center going to be in Palo Alto I called out there had a chance to go out there's some people in the audience today Bill gunning thank God for Bill and Johnny Buck who were there I called my wife and said would you like to move to Palo Alto we were in Rochester at the time she said all of the furniture in the street by the time you get home that wasn't a big convincing job on that one and so there was a chance to actually get the technology from from where it was out to California where there were a bunch of people joining these wonderful bitmaps on ready to do this on screens had no idea how they put this stuff on paper and so here were people drawing things with electron beams and I want to draw the other side with laser beams it seemed like a natural marriage to me it's often very interesting how technology mixes together when the timing is correct had the laser printer been born ten years earlier might have suffered the same fate as the mobile printer too much demand for memory where's the electronics going to carry it I might have disappeared under a table somewhere because it just didn't match right let's be interesting to historically look at those things which might have come out different had they been born in a different time now inside this 2400 some interesting stuff in order to get it to go this speed there were twelve fluorescent lamps in here and if you wanted to speed up even more you can't put in twenty four there's no room in this thing so you know the curved platen that was also a problem Julianna remember people love those things for crushing the bindings of books and so forth it was really wonderful as they gonna smash him over that this curved surface the idea was we could actually print on this drum so in Rochester I actually tried that the problem is this drum is only blue sensitive and in these days it was very difficult to get lasers that were not red this was the years of the only helium neon laser so they then upgraded this machine to the 3601 which was a squeeze of the fluorescent lamps a little harder get another 50% of speed out of this thing and then they went to something at that point in time called the 3600 optical character printer which was a 3600 and their Richards an electronic printing to some extent but they didn't want to change too much so inside that box on the other end of it is a 10 inch diameter drum turning 5200 rpm was a glass drum and bill did some designs on trying to get that thing synchronized because the way it had been designed it didn't line up correctly I won't take you into the ugliness to try and get those characters to not creep on the thing is you print fifty two hundred rpms a very high speed for a ten inch drum one and a half horsepower windage loss inside this thing he had to glue a character mask on the outside of the drum and occasionally would fly off which meant you just drained the dust out and got another one because at that speed or with nothing left I saw being recalled they only made these drums with one lady in Troy New York it would come out of retirement to glue the film on she's the only one who could seem to do it and not have it come off so there were 700 of these made in the original opposition to doing the laser printer was because it put these machines out of business they already invested in 700 of them interestingly enough people kept them once the laser printer came out because they realized that electronic printing was authenticated so the first rule is customers don't care what's inside the box okay it can be elves drawing the pictures so long as it's electronic they want just what to get what they want so following this particularly or around this particular time was something called a 7000 this has a very interesting history associated with it because this machine was a bigger device which had reduction built into it again just a 3600 with the magnification lens inside but what happened was the optical design that was done to do the magnification was extremely poor I don't know how God designed that way and in order to rescue the project there was a new copier being designed that had a drum which was read sensitive not blue sensitive they had to reduce the size of the exposure slit in the copier and therefore as an emergency procedure decided to rush this photoconductor into production to save this project because they did that I could use this engine whether he neon laser is the base machine on which to print so at that point in time the project came to California and here's Edie grab a technician at that time in Rochester with a rig testing a lens for a new copier on this engine with that special drum so we talked ed out of his rig for a week and I went in and strapped a bunch of optics to it and these are this is again simple laser scanner just to show you you have some type of device to deflect the beam a laser that can be modulated and you just synchronize the thing in paint'll dots all over the surface which is I'm sure you already know question was what to use to do the imaging we looked at galvanometers the little wiggling mirrors I'll take you through that in a minute way too slow not adequate prices right however but the performance isn't there's ways of using acoustics to try and deflect things but that wasn't so hot either so we ended up with something ugly like mirrors on a stick okay which is really what this is the biggest problem with this concept is not very high-tech no it's if this would have occurred with the interactions of stellar matter and bosons people would have been thrilled about this thing but it was just shiny glass you know I mean going around in a circle and that wasn't quite as thrilling as other people might have imagined so what we did is we took this I'd put something together to try and figure out what to do just to test it before I really committed that this was something which I thought would work and I think we picked the polygon because it was the only one that could get you the number of spots per scan which I needed up to 7,000 and I needed 10,000 scans per second when I talked to Bill gunning bill was very useful in saying over design this machine because when they turn it into product you don't want it all stressed out reaching those goals very wise help in that regard so I think I'm missing one slide that I didn't seem to show up here let me just back up and see if I got it [Applause] pardon oh yeah we're talking about 1970 just point 1970-71 and we'll just keep going I thought there was one in here that thinks it's wrong to run by me [Applause] I'm gonna guide it through here so we don't miss one of these so far we're doing okay okay it's not cheating me out of any so we picked this and for those who you want to read about it something called a merit function which is the product of the scan angle times the aperture notice that a tenth facet prism dirt simple device the only one that cuts the mustard today it's the only one that cuts the mustard there's just no substitute and a lot of pretenders but nothing's ever replaced it again we wanted to do nine to update from 10 to about 70 million spots per second with this device now there were people who would come out and argue with Bill and some of the others John and so forth that you couldn't switch transistors that fast this was in 1970 I mean I mean that's 10 nanoseconds for goodness sakes you know you can't go that fast and so those arguments however bill was very articulate and showing them that you know electrons really do move much faster than that if you just have the gate small enough so it would work the other thing that you had to worry about from the polygon this is one critical problem is that I was really gonna use about a three thousandths of an inch spot and at 25 inches this says you need something on the order of one arcsecond of precision to keep the spot from wobbling too much well scanners which performed to that tolerance on 20 or 30 facets are $10,000 the lasers were 2500 the modulators were 10,000 the time you added this up owes 50 grand for the scanner it's completely impractical technology I'll show you an example in a minute of things up Bellator's laserwriter near the end and you'll be able to see just how good it came out nevertheless had to come up with a scheme here so I came up with a scheme in which and I can remember sitting in my office in Henryetta New York just try to coming to the west coast to look at this thing that if you just put a lens in here you can refocus it around their error rays back to a point but you can't use just a round lens you have to use the cylinder lens and simple as this sounds I went to the phone and ordered a one of these big long things from Edmund Scientific for five bucks put it in there and I couldn't believe it worked I said I gotta have done something wrong this is none unless can't work this way ten thousand dollars just went to 250 what have I done wrong here you know nothing works that way well it did work that way we had to look at some modulators the only ones available in 1970 were electro-optic we'll talk about those in a minute and then there was a Cousteau optic which was just coming up I think it was Zenith radio research in fact in Menlo Park that was showing some stuff doing that we talked to about those in a minute pardon yeah I will in a minute I will get to that in the talk here's the inside of the machine and you can see it's very busy so the question is how am I going to get the laser beam down among all this contraption stuff in here and in fact we ended up having to cut a hole in the developer housings just the beam was able to slide through a half inch opening thank god they're small to get them down in there too right on the drum because there's the drum isn't in here because I've taken it out but you see is a lot of stuff in here so it wasn't any room for real optics in here this is a setup taken in 1908 1969 early 70 in which this thing ed blab had with a big rack we took his machine and on the rack that sits up here I mounted a polygon it's out of focus I apologize for that but it was you know almost 30 years old here and put a laser on a bookshelf through a modulator and ran it through some you know real expensive optical parts here a little neutral density filter we could dial to set the exposure correctly hit the polygon and went down to the drum of the Machine and there's the cylinder lens setting down in here and a fella by the name of Bob Kowalski now if you but he worth his work for me at Xerox very key and all of this wired me a detector and something to run this modulator now the reason it was tricky to run the modulator we were trying to do microsecond pulses and this was a one kilovolt thing to turn the laser beam on and off so quite an interesting amplifier I remember when he came over and said you want to do what nevertheless here's the polygon and it proved that it worked we could actually take the wobble out of this system using that so I came hat in hand to Palo Alto bill and John sets up some resources for me those of you who ever were to the early Palo Alto facility the windows were about this far off the ground I don't know if they had extraterrestrials in there one time or what but it was really interesting because you know you had to get down on your hands and knees to communicate through these little windows I think it was some behavioral science building at one point they probably still studying that's why we bent over and just didn't use another building so this brought us then to what I call the early slot now the reason it was called slot is scanning laser to output terminal say why not print it well cos slop is not a good acronym so that's why we didn't didn't pick that one now here was the goal we wanted to use an argon laser because the conventional wisdom at the time from our photoreceptor experts is a toner won't stick to small laser spots I guess I mean that was the theoretical view and furthermore the spot exposure time will be so small that you will have reciprocity failure now reciprocity failures says that intensity times time is not a constant so a three day exposure through a small f-stop on your camera is not the same as a microsecond exposure with a very bright light now film has a horrible reciprocity failure problem interestingly enough photo conductors are linear over nine log orders from what we can tell they're linear from about a nanosecond to a week so thank you thank you thank you for that working that way that's wonderful capability we had to pick a 12,500 rpm mirror conventional copy lens to do the imaging you didn't know how to what the optical system would look like and in electro-optic modulator that went to 25 megahertz now that's because we're gonna have to modulate it roughly that rate the beast' R stands for dye deuterium it was a special crystal and we'll talk again about what an electro-optic modulator does and standard meters in optical part so this is a picture of the original slide that I used to sell a project so this was the list of things this was a drawing of how it was all going to go together I remember sitting in the office in 3180 Porter Drive and sketching that up I don't think we actually build it that way but it was good enough for a sketch here was the whole optical system this is again the drawing from the thing a modulator a little lens here which spread out the laser beam imaged it onto the mirror down through this correction cylinder and onto the scan line and what's not shown in here is a scan detector we'll talk about that in a minute for synchronization so this is what I started out with in fact all the original optics came out of the copier and had been scientific so I mean probably what seven eight dollars worth of parts in the optical system the other thing is is that the way the optical system was designed the true spot fault fell in an arc well the surface of the drum is flat or at least you know it's it's straight so you had to worry about this problem of would it stay in focus well the f-number the optical system is about a hundred and if you do the calculation for visible light depth of focus is about an inch and a half that's a diffraction depth so don't make any difference if it's curved him so that fell out of the whole system as well there's some cue geometry about the mirror that I don't have time to go into but I learned a great deal about three-dimensional geometry on a scan system like this all kinds of little gremlins were in there to get us but we solved those problems facet to facet angles and things like that and the other thing is you had to worry about the limits on a spinning disk now there's stresses that get into that so fortunately at 12,500 that's a reasonable speed but we had to worry about that especially since the first polygon was glass and we didn't want this thing going off people are physically who's sitting back there who was such a help and all the mechanical design and the other optical design everything else on this said you know if you gotta finish the hole right in there this thing will crack and let go on you and of course they don't warn so the other thing are windy losses you've got all these 24 little paddles spinning at 12,000 rpm so there's some calculations that are near I won't bore you with the details on that but I will find about some limits here here's the sample calculation of windage if I take a 3-inch rotor spinning at 17,500 rpm and free air takes about 2.7 watts if you double that to 35,000 rpm it takes a hundred watts discovered that quite by accident we had had a consultant you'll see some pictures of things he built Reno Castell II who used to be a Columbia University and then was part of Xerox design me some high speed motors supposed to go 60,000 rpm we put some 300 watt amplifiers so we have enough power we thought to drive these things at 60,000 rpm at 35,000 rpm I had the amplifier wide open everything is heating up motor amplifier and we can't get the speed over about 32,000 rpm because the windage losses are climbing astronomically out of this thing and so there was some interesting situations that arose from this that we had to learn about the paddling of air not only that it's not made a wonderful siren here's the first mock-up of the laser printer we used a big 500 milliwatts argon laser because the conventional wisdom said toner won't stick to the spots and oh by the way you won't be able to expose the drum because of reciprocity failure so John air box said well why don't we get a big enough laser so if that's a problem this should cover it it sure did I think we're incapable of transferring photoconductor to the paper toner in reality we couldn't put enough filters in front of this laser because you only needed three milliwatts to do the exposure and this thing was pumping out 500 at a wire line you don't see here running cuz it's a water-cooled unit in fact I think we had more problems on the laser and we had with anything else trying to get this thing up and going now inside these things if they go wrong you just have a very expensive aquarium because the cooling water fills up the entire laser cavity here's the electro-optic modulator went through some optics in here to form the beam off the polygon through the lens and down off a mirror and down through a little cut in the developer housing to get to the drum and this was the first system we actually printed anything on to try and do intelligent straight lines you know a little teeny character or whatever it is to show the demonstration now realize this is running at a page a second there's no way to slow this machine down because it's a commercial copier that we've cut the parts out of and you just don't slow that thing down this was also one interesting thing that we learned a lot from I certainly did it's real a logic that users had 58 electromagnetic relays in it and every time this thing would run and have to do something this relay would click on and off and it was like an electromagnetic pulse going through everything here the little Scan detectors want ape you know seeing these giant electromagnetic pulses going on and off and we couldn't synchronize to anything on this thing we managed to find come under control I never slurred so much about Gaussian shields in my life I was trying to double shield this because fields couldn't get inside I could hear my physics instructor going I told you you should have known that better this is what happens when you don't screw the glass polygon on we started up one day and all excitement to try out a new circuit and I turned this thing on and they just lifted off nicely and went over to the side of the room like that hit the wall I went Bing Bing Bing Bing around this until it came to a stop Bob Kowalski and I were doing a very clever dance trying to stay out of the way of this thing it didn't break what I did is just knock a chunk out of the side so it didn't actually disintegrate due to the speed it actually hit the wall is what caused that I actually still have that in my office as a reminder of you know make sure everything's right before you power up now let's talk about modulators because this was a very critical area in making this cost effective epochal cell basically uses a crystal of potassium dihydrogen phosphate or potassium dyed deuterium phosphate and you apply a voltage across the faces of this to get the pockels effect the curve ectis isn't across the vertical portion across the ends is the pockels effect and it's linear with electric field so what causes this rotation of the polarization in the cell and therefore by using an analyzer and a polarizer you can cause the light to be modulated you cannot directly modulate a gas laser they're not very good for the for the device and if you do you gotta you're limited to maybe a megahertz so this was capable of 25 megahertz that they have been operated up to as high as a hundred fifty I think you can buy them today even though I they're kind of getting collectors items to see that the hardest thing about this is the driver because it took they stack six of these together to get the voltage down so the voltage was 110 volts the amplifiers had to switch this in ten nanoseconds the capacitance of the cell is 120 pika variable what you have is two amps in 10 nanoseconds going into this thing and they had these little transistors these little bent coils that they were twisted until they got the problems to go away this had these little tight coils to tune this circuit so that it would work and you looked at this amplifier the cell was cheap by comparison to the electronics on there because they had these big transistors because these things had to dump a lot of current in a very short time they worked however except there was one additional problem the pockels effect is very sensitive to temperature which meant that if the temperature changes on this so does the plane of roller polarization and therefore what you had to do was if the data loads through the if you changed the what you were printing the cell got warmer or cooler hence the plane of polarization changing the contrast would go away so you printing a page and then also the stuff would disappear in there because the cell would heat up so you had to then put an auto tracking circuit that would keep the temperature of the cell under control feedback a contrast change and after a while you're saying I don't think this dog is gonna hunt for a product I mean this is just gonna fortunately about this point in time through some work done by very many people at Zenith and so forth with something called the acousto optic modulator and basically through something as simple as glass or water water has the problem it's a wonderful medium it just leaks so using something like glass you have a transducer and you launch an acoustic wave through the cell probably in the neighborhood of 80 to 400 megahertz and it causes compression waves in the material that cause diffraction to occur when light passes through it so you can see an optical beam here when it's in this position the light is diffracted when it's in this position it is not and if you put a stop in there you can then get the light to go on and off one of the problems is you can't get twenty five megahertz out of these things because if the beams a millimeter in diameter and the speed of the material is three thousand meters per second you can do the calculations it's not going to work so what you do is you focus the beam down to a point so that it takes less time for the sound wave to cross the optical beam however then there's less waves in the cell you get poorer refract reporter diffraction so you have to crank the frequency up to shorten a wavelength and you fortunately reach of a nice workable solution at about 200 megahertz and you can easily get to fifteen to twenty-five thirty megahertz out of these things much higher if you really work with the technology interesting thing there's very few the speed of sound oh it's almost constant in most materials I think it's four thousand meters per second in Dimond and three thousand meters per second and water and in between for everything else so it's not the variable you should try to adjust if you're trying to design one of these things here's the typical self a little modulator block with a little tuning thing on here lenses to focus the beam in the cell John signed a lot of purchase orders for these things and I'm very reliable theoretically quite inexpensive on the order of a couple three hundred dollars for this no contrast drift extremely reliable devices I mean basically it's like running a CB radio I mean that's really all it is the polygon then we had to also concern ourselves with bearings and so Tibor had joined us by this time has been out there a while and we were looking at ways of making inexpensive bearings however as we tried to look at where things would go you're gonna have to have higher in higher speeds so we took had Reno Castell a design us some polygons for varying speeds and here's an air bearing unit that he designed in which you have the rotor on an alumina shaft and I remember asking him how do I clean that he said simply just use a razor blade to scrape off the dirt yet we'll clean the alumina and sharpen the razor blade so alumina is nice thing it's harder than steel so it was very nice there's no way you're gonna ruin anything so this device was capable of running at 60,000 rpm however the amplifiers didn't want to do that because if you do the calculations we've been putting about 500 watts into the motor and this poor little armature just couldn't cut that this is a what we call the self acting you pressurize the endcaps and the rest of it was self acting when it would come up and spin laminar flow around the axle of the spinner would float it this one was totally pressurized and this was a grease bearing device that we use so we designed three different bearing technologies to try and see how this would go these were not intended to replace the cylinder lens they were intended to be long life high speed versions of this above 20,000 or 25,000 rpm ball bearings get into trouble it's not because of the loads it's because the little balls are spinning so fast in the races that they start to undergo self destruction even though I think that's been helped a great deal by precision bearings none of these designs ever made it into production it was the ball bearing I think that you see there today Fujitsu designed a printer that actually ran at 42,000 rpm albeit with large amplifiers but they got around this problem because they used helium environments to allow the Reynolds number to climb so they wouldn't go turbulent flow around the axis of this thing I don't know how many printers they build I saw output from I've never seen the real printer so I would guess keeping pressurized helium and one of these things was not you know the most inexpensive thing you could imagine this is the assembled unit here actually a very nice unit you could put anything in here you wanted supposedly dry nitrogen was the best we hooked it up to the house compressed air that was available in the research center and of course that was nice except it wasn't really all that clean and after a while it wouldn't go so fast you there was oil and junk and everything else in there so this actually was a very good scanner but never made it in in any product great study however is what makes this fly here's a simple little drawing of how we were going to make this work we were going to put the laser scanner on this copier I had an image buffer and a computer see how complicated that diagram is that really sell today but anyway that was our model of how this would work this is the same contraption with a small helium neon laser bill going suggested we buy a scanner from someone who could just make us a high-precision one we could compare results so we bought one from speed ring in Detroit and tested it for a while before our other less costly scanners came in and were worked I think I have a legacy with new part research and Oriel corporation we've got all kinds lemierre's mounted on a bed there to do that here you can see one with the electro-optic modulator the polygon spinning nice bullets through everything this kind of built like a locomotive so there was no real problem here to make things simpler we just have a microscope mounted on this thing and we could do experiments all day long a couple of interesting problems arose the correction cylinder lens was fairly close to the drum and what happened is little taller tornadoes would go around on the inside of this drum that just kind of a dirty environment if you ever opened up an earliest copying machine you know chunks of black stuff fell out I mean it was really kind of a dirty environment in there it so happened that the toner would deposit itself the little particles on the lenses and the laser beam was not moving through the same zone of the cylinder even though it was lying on the drum it was moving through different zones of the cylinder due to the facets being slightly different which meant you got wonderful little blank out patterns where the beam would move up and hit a toner particle and back out and not be occulted again by that so you're having little eclipses going on back and forth as this thing went on and off across the lens surface so we redesigned the optics move to cylinder two or three inches away and got it got away from the toner tornadoes to affect us this is the console really sophisticated electronics 32 kilobyte Nova 800 computer sitting over here is a disk drive that had 2.2 megabyte capacity had a head per track I don't remember who made it they'll probably remember but it was capable providing us the data rates we needed to test this so here was the copier control here and the amplifier which was a Harman Kardon to phase in stereo amp to run the motor and we'd load code from the tape here and of course 32 kilobytes you imagined you know today they don't even use that for cash so as you look at this we could put this together here's the modulator controls and this like a Space Launch I mean this was really great you know the shuttle is ready the cable drop away and you'd make a print it was hardly something automatic I know my wife came in one day and said you can't just say print you know please go go would you going this is about 1972 the first printer came up and ran in 1971 it was interesting because the first year at Park who was wonderful because John and Bill we work together and we had nothing but complete time to spend working on this when it worked I don't think the next year I got anything done because we had these incoming jumbo jets full of Xerox executives who had to see this thing some of them the very ones who didn't think it would work coming in and so we had visitors like mad we had often suggested maybe Jack Goldwyn should have built for the Research Center in Hawaii we could call it Herc in case and the trouble is Jack Jack often said if I had done that we'd never kept the Stanford Connecticut people away because they had come there for any reason so this was the console I did a lot of useful stuff Bob Kowalski built all this up and this brings us to the second little problem which was synchronizing the laser beam so we had a detector which had two pieces to it and the logic was the laser beam intensity could fluctuate slightly and yet you had to turn this on in something like a thousandth of an inch the beams 3000 sinh diameter so the idea was you'd go from one half to the other half with a slight separation between the detectors and you would sense crossover so this was built on an emitter coupled logic basis and here you can see on an oscilloscope the first half the detector the second half and you basically trigger right here at this point can actually ended up a wonderful little detector system the other thing is is that the time of scan on this particular model of unit was not constant because of the facet angles and therefore we had to make a lock-in of voltage controlled oscillator which would look at the previous scan to see how long it wasn't adjust the frequency for the next scan that actually worked not too bad except for the fact that you're always measuring for the one that had just gone by which meant you were always one late on what you were trying to do we even tried buffers which would store up all the facets and then correct them in order and that didn't work any better you can see the effect here of doing that here's the start of scan this is about 1972 pictures here glad Kodak fixed these as well as they did here's the start of scan and you can see the end of scanning see the wiggling going on there and we did a lot of chasing on that problem finally discovered it was geometry not electronic or anything else thank goodness for the alto many of you shamsher have seen that this is one of the deluxe versions you had 256 kilobytes of memory L&K to this day laughs about the flak II took for wasting 64 kilobytes for the bitmap display what a profligate use of memory and so this device was then rigged up to be able to print to the to the unit as well fellow name of Bob st. John build me some buffers I think Ron Rider had come aboard at that time and was starting to look at the electronics issue and far as character generation Alan Kay had and I think then law had built a character generator to try and go to the screen and there's a page printed from that first character generator on the device and actually produce something intelligible that didn't have rips and tears and the relays weren't causing the detectors to go bananas so you actually got a complete sheet with all the stuff on it and at that point in time we realized the technology at least it may not have been man rated yet but it wasn't gonna blow up on the pad so that was a release nice now something happened at this point Park yes I'm sorry didn't hear that when this is about 1973 and 1973 Park it hired wonderfully and we I think had we'd filled up Porter Drive building a whose name I can't remember anymore building 30 well wasn't building 30 for those rundown on day 33 thanks listening singer building and then up on the hill they had bought another building building 34 I think it was called that's the singer building yes and it so happened that not the printer and the computer science part of what was going on couldn't fit in the same building and therefore was decided the computer science part should go up on the hill on building 34 and the printed work stay down on Porter Drive problem is the bits are all coming out a kilometer away and the printers down here at the other end so how do we get the data to this thing and so sat down one time and said so why don't we make an optical link because we looked at doing microwave but those are only three megahertz and you got to get enough FCC permission to do that even then so the interesting thing is there are no communications regulations on through the air optical communications as long as the beam power doesn't you know destroy things we built something called a slot Pollos which is the park online office system Jeannie certainly probably remember that so slot polos online optical link and how do you do this well went to my friend's Edmond again I'll get free catalogs for the rest of my life and basically bought for astronomical telescopes and these are just simple Newtonian reflectors and put two in a box at that at the 3180 building on the roof and two on the roof of building 34 put a photomultiplier at the focus of one and a laser at the focus of the other and we had a full duplex optical link running at 30 megabits a second we used helium neon for two reasons first of all relatively inexpensive cousteau optic modulators to turn it on and off and by using visible light there was only one risk fog was was it was a bad thing because you couldn't see through fog on the other hand if you used infrared you could go through rent you couldn't go through rain but you could go through fog so made a back-of-the-envelope judgment that rain was probably going to be more prevalent than fog and went with the visible it was a good choice because i think we're only down one day due to fog in the 1-1 year that the system was up and what would happen is and I'll show you another picture of it here you can see here we are in the roof with a box and there's building 34 and of course foothill expressway runs along here so we couldn't run cables you know Caltrans wasn't too excited about drilling under their freeway to lay wires and you couldn't really dangle anything over them so that's why this worked so there was another box way up here on the roof of this building and almost see it there and I think in the next one there's the box can't remember his name there was a woodworker guy that built all this for me you could lift this hood up and this of course had to be weatherproof the biggest downfall of this thing both these buildings had flat roofs and the alignment between these devices had to be rather precise and so what would happen is that we get rains and everything kind of tilt out and Bob Kowalski and I bought some walkie-talkies and I tell you the number of nights we're up there going do I see it there it went there laughing we were trying to get this flash to go by so we could line up on the sensors again summertime everything stayed in dead alignment in the winter time and every other day this thing was going in and out of stuff so they sat on the roof and the telescope's were setting up the throat of this thing and if you look very carefully right in here's a little red dot coming back at you from the other one so this was one kilometer between the two of these took Mike six microseconds for the beam to make a round-trip and therefore the only downside of printing this way was there was a one inch margin on your cap and the print you couldn't get rid of no way to speed that up now you could have put in another buffer but I mean this is 1973 this memory is still pretty expensive at this point in time at that point in time we decided that the technology looked stable enough we should build a printer that's service to park so we built something called ears electronic array raster scanner Ron Rider was a big designer in that built a very sophisticated character generator for this device I think it would do 20,000 characters a second it would even rotate one character and a word for you doing a data stream so it was feed a data stream to this device it within real-time generate the bits for you and this particular device was used over up by over a hundred users I think it was in service for four years made 20 billion prints 20 billion revolutions on the polygon and this thing ran and ran ran and ran and I think what really sold a lot of Xerox executives is they come out and we were all using this thing to get our work done it wasn't who started up so and so it's going to come out we use this thing in our daily work at that point in time it was decided why don't we make a simpler version of this device so that we can propagate these machines around not just one of them kind of a mount olympus model of printing so that gave rise to something called dover john lnb named it that and so what we wanted was a fast printer for the masses same 7000 machine this thing really got its work cut out for it in fact they were by this time off-lease no one was using seven thousands anymore so we could buy these things out of the warehouse for $700 in fact we proposed making a product based on this there were 25,000 machines off lease at that point and for something like a thousand or two thousand dollars that completely refurbished this page per second machine it was made like a Sherman tank it would just never break down make a long story short these machines end up being cut up for scrap in the Los Angeles warehouse and never saw the light of day as a product too bad so we built 35 of these things you see a Dover had been there and I'll show you some of the things so you can come up later and take a look at it same 7,000 but we got the ugly stuff off of it fellow Boni McGarry swager did a digital interface to this we finally got rid of the clicking and clacking relays so that we didn't have 58 little antennas all the time going off inside this machine and you can see what the inside of this scanner looked like you can these little rods they're supposed to show you what the light path is this one shows what it looks like when you illuminate the rods it's very fortuitous that light is a weakly interacting material it can actually cross itself without causing deflection which is really nice because there was a lot of that going we also went out and built some other machines this was a 3400 copier with a laser scanner built onto it using a helium cadmium lasers one of the more ugly devices ever designed by mankind tons of noise 42% beam intensely function in this particular laser I think the life time was well over 50 hours on most of these things and you better make sure you're ready to print because it didn't have long to do it once you turned it out notice on most of these things we always retained the copying feature the reason was as a smart thing to do in a company like Xerox I mean obviously it was a useful function but this gave rise to the concept what if we made printers which had copying capability with them they would be called multifunction how could you go wrong you want to print your print you want to copy and copy so this gave rise to a number of things not the least of which was a modification to the 9200 which was by this point in time just released machine to pages per second had a belt photoconductor still blue sensitive so we didn't have the read sensitivity anymore and we decided that we'd modify this thing so that we could actually take the platen glass where people copied and you could have a rig which would swing on to the surface and print through the copy lens tried that and it worked but then went to a subsequent modification in which we decided we would wrap the optics around the base of the machine and electrically insert mirrors in front of the copy lens when you want to make a copy with seven seconds you push the button you could make prints in seven seconds or push the button you can make copies again Ron Reiter worked with this a number of people Tibor did a tremendous mechanical design of getting this stuff in here you can see we put a little boxes around here so that would tend to look nice and you can see how this thing all folded out and snap together so there was the RCA Cillian cadmium laser all kinds of brass stops to make sure that this thing aligned when you close the doors I think this is one of the more exciting things Tebow in the shop ever did was to build this particular rig you can see a scan detector here here's the motor which inserts mirrors in front of the copy lens and when it was all done it looked like that and indeed printed at two pages per second and you could make copies at the same time also a key thing in these developments we never changed the materials package in the copier same toner same photo conductor because it was understood this would be a non useless expense to modify this materials package everyone else who worked on laser printers always had a special materials package to work just with print printing so this was considered a right white system you painted away all the charge that you wanted to get rid of you didn't just write the areas that you wanted to have the toner stick to a product actually came out using copying and printing was called the 57-hundred I think there were probably what six or sold something like that wasn't just us IBM had one called the 6670 information distributed the nice thing about these devices is that we found out a lot about systems because if you ever saw any one of these machines there was one of two signs on them please don't use me as a printer or please don't use me as a copier and therefore you could never trust it when somebody would walk up and say oh I'm just gonna make copies no no don't do that I just sent some stuff to it or vice versa and therefore the concept of having a device which could both print and copy had a exciting but very short life all of this in 1976-77 xerox introduced they using basically Ron writers in character generation technology and the optics and scanning systems devised at Parc to produce something called the 9700 this was a 9200 machine with a scanning system built into it which printed at two pages per second to 300 dots per inch it was a cut sheet machine eventually was capable of printing duplex the most significant feature remember the other machines introduced at this time which were both by IBM and Siemens had fan-fold material going through them the problem with fan-fold is if you screw up on a page you get the page and you got a burst it anyway in fact 50% of all the failures that ever occurred in fan-fold machines were bursting the paper didn't happen here the other thing is this machine was just fortuitously architected by the copier people that you could completely write the image on the photo conductor before you had to commit to the sheet of paper and therefore if you made a fault you could just hold a sheet and rewrite the photo conductor hence you've never had to get bad output since it was cut sheet you could feed things in different orders and you were able to print books the biggest concern in this device was it had to print 300,000 pages a month to break even early on the laser failures were stupendous I mean I'll tell you they were air freight in these things and these helium cadmium lasers they finally switched to argon which would have been a better choice in the beginning anyway our guns much more complicated than cadmium just works okay so you know there's no how simple it is it's how simple it is when it works I mean I often think of internal combustion engines have tons of stuff going on inside from a beginning standpoint you'd say well why would anyone ever build anything like that well but it does work and that's key so when this device they finally got those problem fixed and the average monthly print Vong was one and a half million prints great way to get him on the hook and this device eventually went to 600 dots per inch went to 135 pages per minute this is an interesting chart maybe we'll see it very clearly but it shows what happens to the printer bandwidth if you go to four pages per second and 500 dots per inch or up to 100 megabits a second today people are running routinely on the higher speed machines at 50 and 60 megabits per second and perhaps this is a picture of the 9700 sitting in its full glory it's now been retired it's 22 years old amazing I can't believe this product is 22 years old already and currently probably the the best example of this is the dock you tech machine today 135 pages per minute that's 600 spots per inch it's just like printing off anything you want duplex 11 by 17 folding and in fact these do come in color versions then get this out of here you can come up and take a look at these afterwards if you want it's not a commercial for Xerox but nevertheless this is a 40-page permanent color printer running at 400 dots per inch you can come up and take a look at this this is tremendous output so 40 pages per minute in color here's a booklet done on this device staple finished at the output from the Triple A printed in real-time they can customize them for you so what's exciting is the vision we had at the time we started this was electronic printing at where you are and indeed that has come to a realization let me turn this off and show you one thing because today when you hear people talk about can't do that with a flat panel because it's too expensive I look at that the 9700 production cost of the scanner was about five thousand dollars this is from a eight page per minute laser printer today the polygon diode laser no modulator now you just modulate the diode some glass optics plastic holder a mirror scan detector you can take a look at this what do you think this costs thirty eight dollars completely okay now if any one of this was in park would have suggested to Xerox management that would ever get to thirty eight dollars we would have been cashiered at that point because we would have clearly our senses would have left us I would never have been so bold to suggest this get to 38 dollars maybe the polygon get to 38 dollars they make these by the you know twenty-five thirty thousand a month the polygons are six dollars cleaning motor has roughly except for eight pages per minutes got all the performance the original scanner ever did so you can see a little hard work takes you a long ways and to me the exciting thing is you can't imagine enough even for technologists when we think around the edge we're not on the edge we tend to set our own limits because we're afraid people won't believe us and so as I look at things like this I think I was one of the more luckiest people on earth to have a chance to work on this I certainly want to thank Bill and John and so many of the others who helped me in all of this and coming to the West Coast I can't imagine I even contemplated was this a good career move I'll tell you one other interesting story Dave Kearns who was CEO of Xerox came out to visit us on our tenth anniversary last story and I told him I said you know Dave when I came to Xerox PARC I had some people who spurns in my ear saying dangerous move they might close this place they're arcs prone to do that and you'd be left on the west coast and I said some fate so anyway thank you very much for coming I'll entertain questions [Applause] yes are you still working on a laser printing are you following the work of virtually I follow the follow the laser printer work but it's now basically just taken off in mass and when I thought I mean out of the 30 or 40 patents that I had I thought we'd completely wrapped the optical system there was no more to do every month I seat 1520 pens people coming out they put the lens this way put the ones that way so there is no end to how you can innovate on that digital paper virtually yes absolutely yes machine as well - yeah and I'm just very excited about what can be done because why not eliminate that and to argue that it can be done is silly because you cannot believe the studied arguments that were presented on why this will never work you know unfortunately I didn't know that sighs yes so one of the things I remember it may be who comment on this there was an early machine but I think was based on the 3400 that had a microprocessor controlling it I believe it was a 6800 microprocessor and one of the dangers of this machine which was outside of my office was that if the microprocessor failed well the paper was in the fixer yes would catch on fire yes and it was a fire extinguisher that was specially built to spray on the thing we just happened well yeah there was a machine call it was a 3600 Model 3 I showed you the one and the 7000 there was 3600 model 3 there was capable of printing pictures now that might sound silly to us today but it was impossible to print pictures in the early days of xerographic imaging because he didn't know how to get toner to stick to large areas or how to do it in a production sense so this machine was built with a special system to do that and to make the copy quality so high but it fed the print past a very bright light to fuse it trouble is certain times the copy would catch or curl and go up in the light house of the lamp house which caught the copy on fire so there was a smoke detector that looked down the axis of the lamp house and would turn on a co2 extinguisher to blow the fire out so far so good trouble one problem the buzzer would sound when you had a fire the key operator would open the doors when you open the doors underwriters labs requires you to shut down the power and the fire extinguisher went off and the Machine started up again ok and so that time you close the doors has to go through a warm-up cycle before the power is applied again and the result got smoked because so the usual rule was if you hear the buzzer wait till those hissing stops don't open the doors what they did is to rewire the machines to fix it but there's a case of intentions gone awry we elected never to touch that machine for the laser printer so actually that went into history is only a copier so that's what you remembered yes puffins make some forty five hundred sixty five hundred years well I had work I worked on the scanners it's always questionable probably one should admit to having had a chance to work on those the 6500 with Xerox really attempt to do color actually a very brave reach out in a remarkable concept to do full-color copying in 1975 the trouble is the machine was quite unreliable and it had 99 that you could actually make 99 copies I don't know anyone who ever got past nine without a problem so we made some digital printers based on that and was a good way to clear ideas on how it was working and I actually tried very hard but it was a it was a good idea that just didn't wasn't quite ready today the secret is merging microprocessor technology where the xerographic process has taken all the wrinkles out of the system so those were the days of electromechanical solutions now today we use electronic solutions and that's the difference if you ever turn go inside a canon color copier and turn off the micro processors it looks like a 6500 coming out yes they said they were working trick car yes 66 you mentioned 75 what was the first working model of a car that was 1975 it was it was called the epoch machine but there was always work going on inside the question was how do you lighter this into it and basically they took a 914 and just stuffed it full of three color housings cyan magenta and yellow a developer and made the first color copier that way so yeah well was our it was difficult because you had to develop the toners you had to learn how to fuse them he had learned how to make them mix correctly and remember picking colorants was very difficult in the 1960s he had no computers to do this with so you had to take all the CIE numbers and multiply them longhand or if you were so lucky at a marShon calculator yeah there's one number and you know this could take you days to get through a filter design so it was a lot of time and then you'd have to find out that didn't work you do another one so I used to have you know rows of people you know senior filter calculator and junior filter calculator yes the X GP was a print end of an L DX with a higher performance CRT in it in an attempt to try and make a printer out of that and there was a special designs think Jim Rees did it in fact with some light pipes to try and capture twice as much light and help it a little bit but you know when you're within a factor it to of burning out that's not much you can do I will say there was one model of thing I didn't mention that since you've raised the question that was called the Allegro project and this was a stroke driven CRT which would the intent was to draw the characters on the face of the CRT since you didn't have to rasterize you could get the brightness way up and these were running very bright CRTs the trouble is I had my two or three person crew and John was supporting us and they had 30 people on their project in Rochester so how do you decide which one to use so I decided to invoke a contest will agree on a certain set of prints we have to make and one of them was graph paper well try and get an electron beam to make a right angle okay and I mean magnetize your watch on the way around the corner so it work and they could not pass muster on graph paper and the thing fell out of favor and the laser scanner got the nod to go ahead yes in your Trenton describing all these wonderful machines that came out of Xerox you didn't mention the thing that I remember is one two three three two one oh yes yeah well the one two three three two one never actually made it to product this was a machine that was intended to reduce copy down on to an electronic accounting machine card so it was three two one reduction you'd put it to make your card so you could literally file the card with punchouts and then put the image back in and blow it back up it was quite good but it was ever only a prototype the toner was small and it never never worked really as a product it was not shipping news [Laughter] 720 was just a double speed 914 putting a faster pulley and that's all it was and then there was a 1440 by the way in which they put in even smaller pulley and okay but after a while you just can't go bang bang bang bang bang go the scam lamps only so often and then that didn't work well you have to understand the 914 was built on a shoestring Jill wits and literally bet his his entire personal wealth on getting that project out every firm you can imagine marketing firm IBM Kodak 3m all said this is a dumb idea and Joe said I maybe he told us the story said I said in my house one night and said I think they're all wrong I'm gonna go ahead with this and so the 914 was basically what they could afford to do and the 720 then was a Polish up on that he learned yeah you learned by doing and so the 720 was a cleaned up version of that German yeah this is more common than a question the it wasn't clear from your slide that the ears which we had in this sort of the early to mid 70s was actually a $500 per inch machine that's correct yep that's thanks from and I was finishing up my thesis at Stanford at the time and my hardest problem with my one of my readers who was a statistician was giving him this stuff that looked like they'd been Xerox copying out of textbooks yes and say ignore the the forum look at the content which is junk because nobody never seen this stuff that's right well we did do $500 into the page a second and that was at Bill guns insistence because the 9700 was 300 dots per inch and we were able to relax the mechanicals back to less demanding situation but you know 500 dots per inch the other thing was getting enough memory to drive this thing so we were reading from a disk and going into a FIFO buffer because you couldn't get 500 dots per inch density for a full page of stuff he couldn't the memory would fill a room like 384 he did yep and there were some other things you know that that that was another situation as well yep Dover's was reduced and that was because of the issue issue with the alto the alto couldn't push 500 dot per inch data rates as you probably know there was a much earlier computer printer based on the news or x9 14 at gonna MIT Lincoln lab and that probably would have made a pretty good product if Xerox could have been convinced to manufacture it okay I don't know if the word of that ever got anywhere within the management sure the problem was is that the way products were designed in those days it was copy volume that drove the product and 94 teens were way too slow 7 pages per minute they say well why what makes personal printers so so useful then the reason is it's consumables I mean if you were to pour the toner in a laser writer with a bottle you could save a lot of money except on dry cleaning okay and therefore people have elected to spend the money on the cartridge it's probably three times as expensive to use a cartridge but you don't care because you don't want you want clean hands operation in those days that was not understood and it was copy volume that one over remember the 9700 was shown on a business plan not to be useful till you could cross 300 thousand a month 914 if you ran 24 hours a day you couldn't make that money so incidentally that printer shared with your later product a tendency to catch fire and burn yes that they initially had a fire extinguisher next to it that's used it up very quickly and switched to having a an output paper tray that was made out of metal with a lid that you could put on and just let it burn itself out yeah they thought the fuser was a radiant fuser as it was called that was the technical name for it actually referred to as a pizza oven by those of us who had to easily use the thing and this thing would come up and glow and God forbid the paper stopped in air because it was proof and it was gone yes the reasons it was called a pizza oven was the earlier flat plate cameras there aux miss we actually heated pizza in it that's great one comment about the 5700 I worked on the 5700 for a couple years with Ron writer one of the things that was fairly innovative about the 5700 was the use of the alto bitmap display for the entire user interface' to come here and I was one of the things that Kearns is adored about it and then there was a huge war inside of Xerox to against the electromechanical twisty knobs type guys back in Rochester so that's one of the reasons why then when a 5700 died it was like it got killed by politics because of things in the docq text system they've also that was the first beginning we used to use to color for the user interface and all the shading on the buttons and all that than all the air kanami things there was another successor product of the 5700 they were code name Xenia Verde and they were mostly these card reader things for all those weird IBM magnetic strip cards and all that I used to use the printer quite a bit in El Segundo with a writer and company but yeah you know it was more of a political product and it was a market driven product cause it was against that IBM product and they felt that they would really going to lose huge market share even though there was an enormous amount of work done on handling half-tones an innovation a halftone imagery and all those other things yes well that's that's interesting story because today the still talk about multifunction you can see them today in inkjet or laser form there's still the same system issues I mean they can give you the functions but what do I do when I'm trying to receive a fax and I was just trying to make a copy well you got to put in a lot of control logic to say please hold a call or buffer the data or something so that's still a problem today on the system handling of all of this it hasn't really hurt the sales perhaps all that much but it's by no means a runaway success if you read the multifunction printer report every month as I do you'll find out it's still a good idea trying to find it's a solution in search of a problem okay yes like a single user sort of situation because you're less likely to be trying to do multiple things that's true is that position so it could be like a consumer product no it is however there are ways to do multifunction for example if you take a canon 500 or a xerox splash machine you hook them to a fiery controller the fire control will spool the data stream rasterized the images while you're making copies so you can just interrupt it and do that so what you have to do is have to have a sophisticated controller that doesn't push the people who are trying to send data off the net and say excuse me I'm not available right now for some reason it just takes their data and for all they know things are getting done and so it basically acts as a buffer and that's been a successful characteristic of those devices but those are $30,000 boxes and so that's a lot of my personal range here but you're right that's a good point yes well it's interesting because in those days it was perceived that Kodak and IBM were the two key competitors we had to worry about IBM introduced the 3800 in July of 1975 it was a wonderful machine it but it was basically a line printer replacement it did a hundred eighty by a hundred and forty four dots per inch which was good enough for a line printer but it wasn't the 300 dots per inch square that the 30 9700 did so we worried a lot I certainly did about what IBM was doing unbeknown to me I to neighbors working on the 3819 unto them that was I was working on that we later laughed at barbecues about all the sweat that we had but guess what the one person we didn't pay attention to and no one would have guessed was Hewlett Packard who's the Big Kahuna okay in printer volume at this point in time and so while we were all watching each other a little farther up on Hillview some people are getting some bright ideas on working with canon so i think it's remarkable in the history of this thing that an instrument company ends up dominating in the I don't guess I don't know quite where you'll cut it but say 20 page per minute and below they own two-thirds of the market so that you know we worried about the wrong people I mean IBM got out of the business formed Lexmark which is doing okay now IBM looks like they're getting back in but this is you know you get to go you don't get to get past goal you go to jail and you get to start back up the hill again on that one so I really appreciate everyone turning out this was I say more fun than I ever dared imagine [Applause] you want to see a technological evolution there's some abeer on the table [Music]
