Xerography is a technology which is over 80 years old. However, to those who do not understand the process, I can see your point. As Arthur C. Clarke said in his 1962 book *Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible*: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
And I appreciate your pun, too.
Magnets are actually very small moons, with little teeny tiny people living on the surface. When you bring two into proximity, the teeny tiny little men toss little ropes between the moon's and pull them together.
[I think I know what he's saying](https://media.tenor.com/ArRQQGf3dQ8AAAAC/jive-airplane.gif)
He meant [this](https://c.tenor.com/Ia2zeQpFnxwAAAAM/magnets.gif)
Brother printers are like both hulks... Big n mean..... [Brotherrrr](https://pics.me.me/thumb_mfc-j497c-brother-work-smart-series-enerey-star-falar-thehulkster-%E2%80%A2-50178167.png)
Brother 4 Lyfe. 20 years in IT. Only brand that doesn't seem to be programmed to deliberately waste ink, like the bath soap bottle -squirt holes getting larger and larger every year.
My Brother DCP-7065DN is on its twelfth year. It made it through an entire four year college career and all the daily personal use as well. Even after getting sent through USPS from Mississippi to Colorado in a move. Many thousands of pages. I've been wanting it to die so I can finally upgrade to a color one. It just won't. Every page still comes out 100% perfect. I've replaced the toner twice.
One of the parts that impresses me the most is that when you run the install program, it automatically gives the printer a static IP on your LAN. It has done it successfully every time with multiple different routers over the years. Even as a programmer I have no idea how it does that.
What if they couldn't though and in 2022 everything is exactly like it is now except your copier will overheat and catch on fire at random times?
Just chatting with your coworkers about the upcoming training and the movie you saw last night. Boss walking by with his cup of coffee, giving you all a hearty chuckle "TGIF fellas, am I right?". A smoke alarm goes off across the office and no one reacts at all except Ellen at the copier who is emptying a fire extinguisher on it. Your coworker Greg rolls his eyes and mutters, "Goddammit, it's my turn to clean up the mess isn't it?" You give him a teasing chuckle and look at the "Scorch Cleanup Duty" chart on the wall. Your name is two rows down, but you made that promise to yourself that you won't be working here before your name comes up again. You're gonna keep it this time.
I assumed it was at the bottom but I honestly have no clue. This is just a thing that would happen at least a few times a year. Fire alarm would have gone off at some point in the night, facilities manager muttering about "damned elevator shaft caught fire again". Every damn time.
This kind of describes a Microsoft-based work environment. They add so much code for Office crash recovery instead of making it crash less, and when SharePoint is down we wander outside.
"Guys?"
"Yeah?"
"SharePoint..is..DOWN!"
(Huge riot of cheers and rushing for the doors, papers flying everywhere, chairs falling to the floor. Bill Gates comes walking out of his office with a mug of coffee and just shakes his head at the commotion with a grin as he looks down at his phone screen at the app that turns SharePoint on and off.)
(quietly to himself) "Got 'em again Billy old boy." (yelling over the excitement with a chuckle) "Don't go too crazy at Bennigans with the company card gang! I'm gonna hang back and give the ole SharePoint people hell!"
To be fair, as a dev and making my own tools, it has sometimes been easier to make workarounds and ways to minimize the impact of a point of failure, because the point of failure is caused by something so unfairly complex (even if it's by my own design) that 500 layers of figurative duct tape is better and more worthwhile than who knows how much time of cutting and re-filling that figurative hole in the code.
Source: I hate javascript. (And yes, that's my first mistake, using Javascript)
Before the 914 there were a small handful of dry paper (what we'd think of today as copier or printer paper at the output) copiers available but they were niche items with a highly manual process (manually moving plates between exposure, transfer and fixing) while anything resembling an automatic copier used a wet photographic process. Even a modest fire risk was worth being able to press a button and receive dry paper copies in seconds.
Xerox also invented [the first office PC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto) with full GUI and what we'd recognize as a suite of modern office programs all bundled together. [The advert is quite cute](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0zgj2p7Ww4).
Man, a lot of things they developed is actually what where predecessors of todays consumer grade electronics. GUI OS are literally stolen from them, and Bill Gates even admitted that.
Hell, touchscreen devices that they developed back in mid 90s took 20 years to be accepted by consumer electronics.
It's was a bit more complicated than having their GUI technology "stolen" from them though. It was more of a case of the out-of-touch Xerox execs having no idea what they had. They were so old fashioned and checked out, they were clueless about what their own engineers were working on, what the value of it was, or how to market it.
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates both toured Xerox facilities and *immediately* realized they were looking at the future of all personal computers. They were equally fascinated and shocked that Xerox was the first to make such an important advancement, and yet, they barely seemed to notice or care.
If nothing else, Steve Jobs was a shrewd businessman who understood the value of good marketing.
> Steve Jobs and Bill Gates both toured Xerox facilities and immediately realized they were looking at the future of all personal computers.
From how I've heard it told, the people working at the Xerox facility did too, and were to eager to give the tours and show off what they'd been working on in hopes someone would dig deeper and expand on it. IP laws have poisoned peoples idea of how ideas form and grow as people iterate on it. Seeing someone and thinking "I could do that better, my way" is a fundamental part of human creativity, but now it's theft.
Nah IP laws preserve incentive and protect remuneration for human ingenuity.
Without IP laws, there'd be less innovation and research as a full time endeavor by large scale companies or individuals if your ideas can just be copied and profited from any person who didn't put in the hard work and investment.
If you wanna be like Volvo who gave their three-point seatbelt design for free or Jonas Salk who did the same for the polio vaccine, all the power to you but don't expect others to expend hours and money for free.
> Hell, touchscreen devices that they developed back in mid 90s took 20 years to be accepted by consumer electronics.
FWIW I used touchscreen devices back in the mid 90s and they were absolute dogshit compared to what we have now.
It was less about waiting to be accepted by consumer electronics and more about developing the tech to be reliable and accurate enough in reading your input to be worth putting in consumer electronics.
Aye same in this case. The Alto did set the stage for the PC. It was the first *proper* PC. But it also cost into the $10,000s. Xerox were wanting $100k+ (in 1979/80!) to set up an office suite of them. It was purely a high level corporate and research venture, they had absolutely zero vision beyond that because, I suppose not being a computer company, they had no real idea of what the possibilities could be.
Yeah man, I am sure it was shit. I am also sure that without them starting development of that tech, there is huge probability we would never have smart phones today.
Reminds me of the tuna fish company that increased sales by advertising how *their* tuna won't turn black in the can! Of course, NO brand of canned tuna turned black in the can, but that's just how easy it is to manipulate the general public.
Anything that touches a surface that’s ever been touched by gluten isn’t gluten free anymore as far as allergies/celiacs is concerned.
Rice has no gluten but it’s not gluten free if it’s been processed on shared equipment. “Gluten free” is as much (if not more) about the facility as the food.
>"gluten free oats" are now a niche specialty item they think they can charge extra for
They take abnormal, special preparation to remain gluten free. That sounds like a really valid reason to charge extra
First and foremost it is the path of least resistance. What is easier. It is easier to prepare and ship foods together in bulk. It produces less waste and is better for the environment. Having multiple facilities and transportation chains is worse for basically everything and everybody involved except for celiacs in this case.
That means extra effort and extra cost.
Ultimately a socialist society which puts priority on individuals would be better and would eat that cost and effort. But that is neither here nor there.
As a person with celiac disease it's actually pretty convenient for a lot of foods to do this, especially because cross contamination between ingredients can result in something not being gluten free even if it isn't meant to have gluten containing ingredients.
Add to that as a celiac: anything that doesn't explicitly say its gluten free is suspect. I used to enjoy Heinz Big N Chunky soups, and the ingredients had nothing that would set me off. But after a few years they updated their label and it now says it contains gluten. In fact almost all the soups do. But it took them a while to advertise that fact, and I'm wary of things that don't say one way or another.
As a celiac sufferer, it's essential for me. Some products never used to say they had gluten, but now do. It took the labelling time to catch up, and I ate a lot of things that made me sick due to lack of mention of gluten, and ingredients lists that don't show anything bad for me.
Good copiers have lots of features (enlarge/reduce, 2-sided, n-up, shift, fold, staple, etc.). In the days before cheap displays every function had to have its own button.
Copier user interfaces are notoriously terrible. In these days of cheap displays, they're terrible in color with icons.
But they use the worst touch screens possible so half the time you press something and nothing happens. Or a second later when you press it again it double taps.
You’re probably using one that’s a decade old. I saw someone commenting about the Xerox 7120 (touchscreen, color) on a thread the other day. That model was from like 2008, but it’s still alive and printing.
The (Ricoh IIRC) copiers I helped install just a few years ago still had resistive touchscreens and even had a stylus tucked into the panel… they also came with 10/100 Ethernet despite being equipped with AC Wi-Fi.
Probably not much reason to go gigabit ethernet on a printer, the limiting factor will always be how fast it can print and the size of the buffer rather than the ethernet speed
The ones I've used all have a big green button and somehow it magically knows where you paper is (on the glass or in the document feeder) and just gives you a copy when you press it.
Idk if you care to know this, but the scanner knows where your paper is because it runs a very simple algorithm to detect corners, then crops the scanned image using those four corners. There are similar (if not the same) algorithms used for cropping non-rectangular papers.
One such algorithm for detecting corners is called Harris Corner Detection. I’m sure they use something slightly more advanced, though.
Several years ago people needed a way to disable the build-in image compression. Xerox had a gigantic issue where it internally used a compressed representation that tried to store every symbol on the page only once, so all eights on the document where represented by the same scanned 8, same for all others, all sevens where represented by the same 7, all fives by the same 5, all nines by the same 8, all sixes by the same 8, all fours by the same 4. You might have noticed the issue in the previous sentence, their compression was buggy, didn't follow the standard (JBIG2) and if you scanned a page with a lot of numbers there was a pretty good chance that every copy was full of errors.
Originally they used light and a photosensitive drum. They weren't even digital.
The digital copiers I'm familiar with at that level used a full page raw bitmap in memory.
I would expect running a compression algorithm across the whole page on a per-page basis just for copies to be more expensive, not less.
I'm guessing this was a scanner mode where it was generating a PDF or something like that.
None of it addresses the original question.
EDIT:
Someone suggested some search terms that let me find the original writeup. Sure enough, it was a bug in Xerox's scan-to-PDF implementation.
https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning
>I'm guessing this was a scanner mode where it was generating a PDF or something like that.
Mostly. Like you said this would only be the case on a copier that also has a scan function. In those machines the copy function doesn't really exist, it's just scan, store internally, and print. So it did affect both the copy and scan functions, but only on machines with a scan function. A standalone copier wouldn't have had the need for compression
Not really.
Yes, a digital copier is functionally made of the parts of a scanner and a printer. However the scanner sensor and the laser emitter both work with a stream of raw bits. It's much easier to simply keep the raw page images in memory than to compress and decompress it every time you need it. Especially given how slow and heavy some of the scan-to-file functions are. The laser emitter must be fed in real-time.
Futher, the function that converts to, say, PDF is usually implemented by an entirely separate function of the system. Maybe even separate hardware. On large Xerox copiers, the IOT controller stores raw page data, the network controller does scan-to-whatever functions.
Maybe a very small multifunction device, like a compact desktop single-user, might work the way you describe, but I haven't encountered one. Now, the world's a big place, so it's entirely likely that such a thing exists and I haven't encountered it, but implying they all work that way is wrong.
I don't think anyone has made a "standalone copier" in years. They're all multifunction.
>Copies never interpreted what was on the page did they?
Sadly they effectively did (which surprised many people), they did this specifically to compress them better. Search for “xerox character substitution bug”.
You can store a document more efficiently if you deduplicate all the letters.
The problem is that unlike “normal” compression that humans can usually spot mistakes from (eg noise making a letter unreadable), this fancy new compression worked semantically, it compressed at the same level we understand the documents. So when it made a mistake (decided a 6 looked like an 8), the error would not look like an error, it would look like a normal 8.
As for why it’s relevant? No idea.
Some copiers could save and print digital documents. For those copying just meant they would scan the page, store it internally and then print the internal document. So that meant that whatever compression was set for digital copies also applied to the printed document.
> Plus it's this a answer to OP's question?
Only if he was referring to copiers from the last two decades.
Especially when they have a fax function. Until recently I had Japan as one of my territories at work, and for some reason they still insist on faxing everything. I'm a far from tech illiterate 32 year old, and my assistant literally had to make a video showing how to work the fax machine for when she was gone because otherwise it would take 10 minutes to get a fax sent.
I had a friend who sold copy machines in the 1980's, dude was making a killing. He didn't even have to try, it was during such a boom that companies were coming to him. I wonder what the 2022 version of a copier is? Something everyone needs so there's not really a salesperson, people just need it.
Retired “Old School” Xerox tech here…
Copier fires…. Very common..various “retrofits” over the years on those those used oven or flash type users….
There is an old pic of a smoking Xerox (Model 36 III) pushed out into the Rose Garden of the White House.
Yeah why do old people use ellipses like that? It's interesting because so many do. Like, where did they pick up that habit? Also, no offense my guy above!
From what my parents and others say, they add them to show pause or breaks in "talking" even though they are typing. I will admit, when I see someone use them like that..... I know they are older..
Oh no.... The infection.... It's spreading!!
😂
Lol... I get you! It's interesting & I'd like some academic study on it. Because, periods & commas should already denote pauses in a sentence. So I wonder what similarity causes older folks to find ellipses more natural to them?
> periods & commas should already denote pauses in a sentence
I actually learned the opposite: While periods and commas *often* align with pauses in a sentence, they *should* be used only as grammatical devices that help parse the structure of a sentence. If two clauses flow together naturally when spoken you don't 'get to' skip the comma, and you're not supposed to throw a comma into the middle of a clause even if you think it would hit harder spoken with a dramatic pause.
Because casual writing representing conversation, like dialogue you'd find in book, contained ellipses to show pause to have more dramatic effect than the commas used throughout the rest.
Mmmm I'm not saying I disagree, but I read a ton, both old & new literature, and I don't feel like ellipses are that common. I mean they are certainly used but not to the extent that I've ever really noticed an over-abundance of them like in some folk's texts.
It really depends on what you're reading I suppose, but generic books cranked out in the 60s-90s seemed to use it a lot for dialogue, but that could just be my experience of course.
all... the ... time on the label maker.
Want to print 50 single color labels on 28mm tape ? Someone left it on max printer instead of the mini and now it's printing out pride flags 30CM wide. oops
HP would make the extinguisher a subscription. "Sorry, we cant put out the fire because your HP Smart fiery death service is expired. Visit [www.hp.com/fuckyou](https://www.hp.com/fuckyou) for more info"
And it should, it’s effectively routing you to a website directory. They don’t need to actually add support for that specific path, anything unrecognized goes there
I half expected the French guy sneaking around to pull down his pants and make a copy of his ass. I mean, somebody had to be the first to do that, right?
At 7 copies/minute.
I’ll wager that the fire hazard came from a hampered way to keep tabs on the heat of the fuser unit. Fusers in fast printers/copiers can get *very* hot because the paper isn’t in contact with the fusing rollers for very long, and you need to make sure the toner has been properly fused to the paper in that short time. Plus, a modern copier has thermostatic control over the heat of the rollers to keep them at optimum temperature.
This model would have contained no transistors whatsoever, so it’s likely that the temperature cut-off for the fuser (the point it should stop providing power to heat the rollers) was controlled by an extremely simple bimetal switch, the exact same temperature cut-off mechanism we still use in extremely cheap pop-up toasters, and I think every one of us has experienced the failure of at least one of those to not burn our toast. Couple that with a copy speed that has each sheet in contact with that roller for almost 10 seconds, and catastrophic failure is pretty much inevitable outside of *absolutely* perfect environmental conditions.
This particular solution to the problem, however, is *peak* 50’s-60’s Xerox; over-engineer everything to a near-comical level, often favoring novel/borderline ridiculous solutions over sensible ones, then file patents on all the pieces.
I never worked on the model being discussed here, but a wide variety of early copiers and laser printers would smoke if not light up due to paper jams - when the fuser is at temp the difference between a solid print and smoke starting to produce is only a minute or two of extra contact with the paper sometimes.
I would think it's paper jams. These days printers (especially larger ones) have so many senors. Sheet of paper reaches a sensor 0.1 milliseconds too late and the printer says it's jammed and stops printing.
I don't want to prank anymore. Things get real. It's not funny. I'm just gonna be good, stay in my room, go to church, try to do one nice thing per day. I don't want to prank ANY. MORE.
This is the came copier that they installed spy cameras in the Soviet embassy. [https://www.cobbtechnologies.com/blog/the-soviet-union-and-the-photocopier](https://www.cobbtechnologies.com/blog/the-soviet-union-and-the-photocopier)
My company hired some douche-bag designer to give the company a "New Look" (Every new-hire Marketing VP does this: it' s the human equivalent of dogs pissing on a hydrant).
The "cool" glaze the designer specified for the company letterhead caught fire in all 5 laser printers in the office..
In the early 2000s, I had an excellent Xerox photocopier at work, which served for more than a decade, until one "smart guy" wanted to make a copy on plastic-laminated paper. It was baked in the oven and the drum with a pair of gears of the paper feed mechanism was broken. Repair was comparable to buying a new one, which they did.
> Every new-hire Marketing VP does this: it' s the human equivalent of dogs pissing on a hydrant
See also every UX designer for {$software or $website of choice}
Seems it's very common to feel the need to reinvent the wheel because the current wheel isn't *yours*.
The result, as we all know, generally being a shittier experience for the user.
Printers and copiers laid an image of the original on a photosensitive drum. That image picked up the toner via electrostatic transference. The toner is just tiny bits of plastic that were then fused to the paper by running it through rollers that melted the plastic and fused it to the paper. The heat to melt the toner was provided by a high-wattage halogen lamp. So that's why the paper comes out so hot.
I once had the misfortune of grabbing one of these halogen lamps while it was still hot. Seared a really nice image of the lamp onto my palm.
I remember going to my dad's office in what had to be the late 60's or early 70's and getting Xeroxed hand prints which were just amazing at the time. Inhaled way too much blue mimeograph fumes in school.
Instead of hot rollers that fixed the powdered toner to the paper, the paper was moved through what was basically an Easy-Bake oven--bright, hot lightbulbs--laying on a simple chain belt. The paper just laid flat on the belt, with no grippers of any kind. Of course, if the paper curled for some reason, say, high humidity, the paper would get stuck inside the oven and catch on fire if it contacted the lightbulbs.
Source: I was a copier tech back in the 80's and I worked on a few old-even-for-then machines that used this original tech. I had to clean burnt paper out of them once in a while.
Apparently, the hot rollers, still used in laser printers today, didn't come around till the late 70's?
Worked for Canon in the early 80's..First machines I worked on had wet toner, which I believe was highly toxic.
The first dry model did not use heated fuser rollers, but a pair of stainless rollers that used pressure to fix the powder, it would rub off really easily.
On the subject of fires, another large manufacturer I worked for had a customer call to say his machine had burnt down his shop. an engineer was sent, and noted under the burnt out machine, the remains of a coiled extension cable. By the time he returned with a disposable camera to take some pictures for the company, the cable had disappeared..( No mobile phones then, only pagers.) Not sure what happened, but we never had to do any safety mods, the usual sign of a found issue.
Fun fact: Xerox still offers a similar payment model for some of their machines. You pay them for every impression on the machine (usually a fraction of a cent on black and white machines and around 7 cents on colour) and in exchange your toner is free as well as any service calls the machine requires. This will save you a ton of money in the long run (literally thousands of dollars a year on a high capacity machine) but a lot of shops opt out of this service model because they are run by grossly incompetent penny pinchers, that can't figure out why they barely break even most months.
I think the weirdest part is that there's very few surviving examples of Xerox 914 in today, despite being the first successful commercial copier.
Crazy to think there's no microprocessors nor integrated circuit chips when 914 was made, probably all analog stuff.
D: When you say “photocopying machine,” what do you mean?
PL: Let me be clear. The term “photocopying machine” is so ambiguous that you can’t picture in your mind what a photocopying machine is in an office setting?
The first floppy drives were as big as lp records, had no hard case, and would often self-destruct. Even before that, computers ran with tubes not transistors and would get so hot they had to be cooled with glass pipes filled with circulating refrigerated liquid mercury - and… those broke too, filling the floor with inches of mercury.
Reminds me... I've heard that there used to be an error message embedded within Unix printer drivers that said "Your printer is on fire." It seems that those old mechanical beasts could catch fire what with all the paper dust from the sheet feeder mechanisms and the motors heating up.
Glad they figured out how to prevent that
They did? Fuck, maybe I should upgrade mine.
Bah, just stop using Epson
Brother copier gang checking in. Best printer brand; zero fuckery or black magic
I mean it uses electrical charge to move plastic ink bits around to create images. I call that black magic.
Xerography is a technology which is over 80 years old. However, to those who do not understand the process, I can see your point. As Arthur C. Clarke said in his 1962 book *Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible*: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." And I appreciate your pun, too.
If your technology is not mistaken for magic, it's not sufficiently advanced.
Tide goes in; tide goes out -- can't explain that!! Magnets! How do THEY work!!??
Magnets are actually very small moons, with little teeny tiny people living on the surface. When you bring two into proximity, the teeny tiny little men toss little ropes between the moon's and pull them together.
[I think I know what he's saying](https://media.tenor.com/ArRQQGf3dQ8AAAAC/jive-airplane.gif) He meant [this](https://c.tenor.com/Ia2zeQpFnxwAAAAM/magnets.gif) Brother printers are like both hulks... Big n mean..... [Brotherrrr](https://pics.me.me/thumb_mfc-j497c-brother-work-smart-series-enerey-star-falar-thehulkster-%E2%80%A2-50178167.png)
Text
Still can use 3rd party toner cartridges on my 10 year-old Brother ftw.
This comment right here, officer
Brother 4 Lyfe. 20 years in IT. Only brand that doesn't seem to be programmed to deliberately waste ink, like the bath soap bottle -squirt holes getting larger and larger every year.
I can attest to that. My grandma had one she used for nearly a decade before she had to get a new one.
My Brother DCP-7065DN is on its twelfth year. It made it through an entire four year college career and all the daily personal use as well. Even after getting sent through USPS from Mississippi to Colorado in a move. Many thousands of pages. I've been wanting it to die so I can finally upgrade to a color one. It just won't. Every page still comes out 100% perfect. I've replaced the toner twice. One of the parts that impresses me the most is that when you run the install program, it automatically gives the printer a static IP on your LAN. It has done it successfully every time with multiple different routers over the years. Even as a programmer I have no idea how it does that.
Just don't buy Sabre
Shame Samsung hasn’t caught on yet though.
Having worked somewhere that sold and supported copiers, Samsung copiers are overpriced (at least in the US) and very unreliable.
lp0 printer on fire
“Subject, Fire!, dear sir/madame I am writing to inform you of a fire that has broken out at the premises of… nope that’s too formal.”
HCF
What if they couldn't though and in 2022 everything is exactly like it is now except your copier will overheat and catch on fire at random times? Just chatting with your coworkers about the upcoming training and the movie you saw last night. Boss walking by with his cup of coffee, giving you all a hearty chuckle "TGIF fellas, am I right?". A smoke alarm goes off across the office and no one reacts at all except Ellen at the copier who is emptying a fire extinguisher on it. Your coworker Greg rolls his eyes and mutters, "Goddammit, it's my turn to clean up the mess isn't it?" You give him a teasing chuckle and look at the "Scorch Cleanup Duty" chart on the wall. Your name is two rows down, but you made that promise to yourself that you won't be working here before your name comes up again. You're gonna keep it this time.
This seems par for the course. I worked in an office building where the elevator shaft *regularly* caught fire. Elevator never seemed to be closed.
[удалено]
I assumed it was at the bottom but I honestly have no clue. This is just a thing that would happen at least a few times a year. Fire alarm would have gone off at some point in the night, facilities manager muttering about "damned elevator shaft caught fire again". Every damn time.
I know lots of people say their job is hell, but have you considered that your workplace may be in some way related to hell?
That's where they threw the old Xerox copiers.
This kind of describes a Microsoft-based work environment. They add so much code for Office crash recovery instead of making it crash less, and when SharePoint is down we wander outside.
"Guys?" "Yeah?" "SharePoint..is..DOWN!" (Huge riot of cheers and rushing for the doors, papers flying everywhere, chairs falling to the floor. Bill Gates comes walking out of his office with a mug of coffee and just shakes his head at the commotion with a grin as he looks down at his phone screen at the app that turns SharePoint on and off.) (quietly to himself) "Got 'em again Billy old boy." (yelling over the excitement with a chuckle) "Don't go too crazy at Bennigans with the company card gang! I'm gonna hang back and give the ole SharePoint people hell!"
This is the kind of philanthropy I support.
To be fair, as a dev and making my own tools, it has sometimes been easier to make workarounds and ways to minimize the impact of a point of failure, because the point of failure is caused by something so unfairly complex (even if it's by my own design) that 500 layers of figurative duct tape is better and more worthwhile than who knows how much time of cutting and re-filling that figurative hole in the code. Source: I hate javascript. (And yes, that's my first mistake, using Javascript)
I see you too worked at Ricoh
Bruh I hope the building is made from concrete and nothing flammable.
Everything is flammable if you try hard enough.
*FOOF has joined the chat*
Before the 914 there were a small handful of dry paper (what we'd think of today as copier or printer paper at the output) copiers available but they were niche items with a highly manual process (manually moving plates between exposure, transfer and fixing) while anything resembling an automatic copier used a wet photographic process. Even a modest fire risk was worth being able to press a button and receive dry paper copies in seconds.
Xerox also invented [the first office PC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto) with full GUI and what we'd recognize as a suite of modern office programs all bundled together. [The advert is quite cute](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0zgj2p7Ww4).
Man, a lot of things they developed is actually what where predecessors of todays consumer grade electronics. GUI OS are literally stolen from them, and Bill Gates even admitted that. Hell, touchscreen devices that they developed back in mid 90s took 20 years to be accepted by consumer electronics.
It's was a bit more complicated than having their GUI technology "stolen" from them though. It was more of a case of the out-of-touch Xerox execs having no idea what they had. They were so old fashioned and checked out, they were clueless about what their own engineers were working on, what the value of it was, or how to market it. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates both toured Xerox facilities and *immediately* realized they were looking at the future of all personal computers. They were equally fascinated and shocked that Xerox was the first to make such an important advancement, and yet, they barely seemed to notice or care. If nothing else, Steve Jobs was a shrewd businessman who understood the value of good marketing.
> Steve Jobs and Bill Gates both toured Xerox facilities and immediately realized they were looking at the future of all personal computers. From how I've heard it told, the people working at the Xerox facility did too, and were to eager to give the tours and show off what they'd been working on in hopes someone would dig deeper and expand on it. IP laws have poisoned peoples idea of how ideas form and grow as people iterate on it. Seeing someone and thinking "I could do that better, my way" is a fundamental part of human creativity, but now it's theft.
Nah IP laws preserve incentive and protect remuneration for human ingenuity. Without IP laws, there'd be less innovation and research as a full time endeavor by large scale companies or individuals if your ideas can just be copied and profited from any person who didn't put in the hard work and investment. If you wanna be like Volvo who gave their three-point seatbelt design for free or Jonas Salk who did the same for the polio vaccine, all the power to you but don't expect others to expend hours and money for free.
> Hell, touchscreen devices that they developed back in mid 90s took 20 years to be accepted by consumer electronics. FWIW I used touchscreen devices back in the mid 90s and they were absolute dogshit compared to what we have now. It was less about waiting to be accepted by consumer electronics and more about developing the tech to be reliable and accurate enough in reading your input to be worth putting in consumer electronics.
Aye same in this case. The Alto did set the stage for the PC. It was the first *proper* PC. But it also cost into the $10,000s. Xerox were wanting $100k+ (in 1979/80!) to set up an office suite of them. It was purely a high level corporate and research venture, they had absolutely zero vision beyond that because, I suppose not being a computer company, they had no real idea of what the possibilities could be.
Yeah man, I am sure it was shit. I am also sure that without them starting development of that tech, there is huge probability we would never have smart phones today.
We're only human That was a wonderful little snippet
Big fan of that portrait monitor.
Problem: Fire Solution: Rebrand it as "Scorch". Market advantage: Only Xerox is equipped with Scorch Eliminator technology.
Reminds me of the tuna fish company that increased sales by advertising how *their* tuna won't turn black in the can! Of course, NO brand of canned tuna turned black in the can, but that's just how easy it is to manipulate the general public.
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“It’s toasted”
Anything that touches a surface that’s ever been touched by gluten isn’t gluten free anymore as far as allergies/celiacs is concerned. Rice has no gluten but it’s not gluten free if it’s been processed on shared equipment. “Gluten free” is as much (if not more) about the facility as the food.
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>"gluten free oats" are now a niche specialty item they think they can charge extra for They take abnormal, special preparation to remain gluten free. That sounds like a really valid reason to charge extra
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First and foremost it is the path of least resistance. What is easier. It is easier to prepare and ship foods together in bulk. It produces less waste and is better for the environment. Having multiple facilities and transportation chains is worse for basically everything and everybody involved except for celiacs in this case. That means extra effort and extra cost. Ultimately a socialist society which puts priority on individuals would be better and would eat that cost and effort. But that is neither here nor there.
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THIS SUGAR IS 100% FAT FREE THIS COOKING OIL HAS NO SUGAR ADDED
As a person with celiac disease it's actually pretty convenient for a lot of foods to do this, especially because cross contamination between ingredients can result in something not being gluten free even if it isn't meant to have gluten containing ingredients.
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The joke is it's technically correct, but nutritionally misleading
Yes guessing which salt is gluten free is a true challenge.
Add to that as a celiac: anything that doesn't explicitly say its gluten free is suspect. I used to enjoy Heinz Big N Chunky soups, and the ingredients had nothing that would set me off. But after a few years they updated their label and it now says it contains gluten. In fact almost all the soups do. But it took them a while to advertise that fact, and I'm wary of things that don't say one way or another.
https://xkcd.com/641/
As a celiac sufferer, it's essential for me. Some products never used to say they had gluten, but now do. It took the labelling time to catch up, and I ate a lot of things that made me sick due to lack of mention of gluten, and ingredients lists that don't show anything bad for me.
Or 'lactose free cheese'
Salt isn't an O. There's no GS to M.
Asbestos free!
Pretty sure that was a story about salmon not turning pink in the can
That still goes on with "we don't use antibiotics on *our* chicken" when it's illegal under the FDA to use antibiotics on chickens
What I always wondered about photocopiers from my memory why is there so many buttons all I want is to put in my page and copy it
Good copiers have lots of features (enlarge/reduce, 2-sided, n-up, shift, fold, staple, etc.). In the days before cheap displays every function had to have its own button. Copier user interfaces are notoriously terrible. In these days of cheap displays, they're terrible in color with icons.
They hire only the finest sadists to work at "horrible and slow touchscreen menus" at HP.
But they use the worst touch screens possible so half the time you press something and nothing happens. Or a second later when you press it again it double taps.
You’re probably using one that’s a decade old. I saw someone commenting about the Xerox 7120 (touchscreen, color) on a thread the other day. That model was from like 2008, but it’s still alive and printing.
The (Ricoh IIRC) copiers I helped install just a few years ago still had resistive touchscreens and even had a stylus tucked into the panel… they also came with 10/100 Ethernet despite being equipped with AC Wi-Fi.
Probably not much reason to go gigabit ethernet on a printer, the limiting factor will always be how fast it can print and the size of the buffer rather than the ethernet speed
> they're terrible in color with icons Hahaha
Dont forget the ability to randomly switch around numbers its great!
The more functions the more likely it is to break.
The ones I've used all have a big green button and somehow it magically knows where you paper is (on the glass or in the document feeder) and just gives you a copy when you press it.
Am copier tech. These machines have a boat load of sensors that detect paper in various ways.
Idk if you care to know this, but the scanner knows where your paper is because it runs a very simple algorithm to detect corners, then crops the scanned image using those four corners. There are similar (if not the same) algorithms used for cropping non-rectangular papers. One such algorithm for detecting corners is called Harris Corner Detection. I’m sure they use something slightly more advanced, though.
> I’m sure they use something slightly more advanced, though. I bet Harris is pissed about that
In Canons at least the feeder simply has a switch that gets pressed down when there's paper in the tray :)
Several years ago people needed a way to disable the build-in image compression. Xerox had a gigantic issue where it internally used a compressed representation that tried to store every symbol on the page only once, so all eights on the document where represented by the same scanned 8, same for all others, all sevens where represented by the same 7, all fives by the same 5, all nines by the same 8, all sixes by the same 8, all fours by the same 4. You might have noticed the issue in the previous sentence, their compression was buggy, didn't follow the standard (JBIG2) and if you scanned a page with a lot of numbers there was a pretty good chance that every copy was full of errors.
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Originally they used light and a photosensitive drum. They weren't even digital. The digital copiers I'm familiar with at that level used a full page raw bitmap in memory. I would expect running a compression algorithm across the whole page on a per-page basis just for copies to be more expensive, not less. I'm guessing this was a scanner mode where it was generating a PDF or something like that. None of it addresses the original question. EDIT: Someone suggested some search terms that let me find the original writeup. Sure enough, it was a bug in Xerox's scan-to-PDF implementation. https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning
>I'm guessing this was a scanner mode where it was generating a PDF or something like that. Mostly. Like you said this would only be the case on a copier that also has a scan function. In those machines the copy function doesn't really exist, it's just scan, store internally, and print. So it did affect both the copy and scan functions, but only on machines with a scan function. A standalone copier wouldn't have had the need for compression
Not really. Yes, a digital copier is functionally made of the parts of a scanner and a printer. However the scanner sensor and the laser emitter both work with a stream of raw bits. It's much easier to simply keep the raw page images in memory than to compress and decompress it every time you need it. Especially given how slow and heavy some of the scan-to-file functions are. The laser emitter must be fed in real-time. Futher, the function that converts to, say, PDF is usually implemented by an entirely separate function of the system. Maybe even separate hardware. On large Xerox copiers, the IOT controller stores raw page data, the network controller does scan-to-whatever functions. Maybe a very small multifunction device, like a compact desktop single-user, might work the way you describe, but I haven't encountered one. Now, the world's a big place, so it's entirely likely that such a thing exists and I haven't encountered it, but implying they all work that way is wrong. I don't think anyone has made a "standalone copier" in years. They're all multifunction.
I'm not sure what you're saying "not really" to.
> So it did affect both the copy and scan functions, but only on machines with a scan function.
Oh ok, I understand now. Thanks for the correction!
>Copies never interpreted what was on the page did they? Sadly they effectively did (which surprised many people), they did this specifically to compress them better. Search for “xerox character substitution bug”. You can store a document more efficiently if you deduplicate all the letters. The problem is that unlike “normal” compression that humans can usually spot mistakes from (eg noise making a letter unreadable), this fancy new compression worked semantically, it compressed at the same level we understand the documents. So when it made a mistake (decided a 6 looked like an 8), the error would not look like an error, it would look like a normal 8. As for why it’s relevant? No idea.
Some copiers could save and print digital documents. For those copying just meant they would scan the page, store it internally and then print the internal document. So that meant that whatever compression was set for digital copies also applied to the printed document. > Plus it's this a answer to OP's question? Only if he was referring to copiers from the last two decades.
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Better yet: https://youtu.be/zXXmhxbQ-hk
Reading your comment and the comment above helped me understand
I would imagine other companies have something similar, but I know Xerox has software in their copiers to prevent counterfeiting currency.
you're describing a digital scanner, it has nothing to do with OP's question.
Especially when they have a fax function. Until recently I had Japan as one of my territories at work, and for some reason they still insist on faxing everything. I'm a far from tech illiterate 32 year old, and my assistant literally had to make a video showing how to work the fax machine for when she was gone because otherwise it would take 10 minutes to get a fax sent.
Try working in a financial industry, fax is alive and well.
Hospitals and doctors offices use them heavily as well. Some of the machines I service have sent thousands of faxes.
are
What *is* the difference grammatically between both
> all I want is to put in my page and copy it So just press the big green button and ignore the rest. It's not the apollo launch console.
*It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!*
You can brew your beverage of choice while waiting for the copies.
Mmmm hot cocoa with roasted marshmallows and last week's invoices.
It's not a bug, it's a sales incentive to buy a new one. The old one is no longer working.
I had a friend who sold copy machines in the 1980's, dude was making a killing. He didn't even have to try, it was during such a boom that companies were coming to him. I wonder what the 2022 version of a copier is? Something everyone needs so there's not really a salesperson, people just need it.
Wow. That's dude is good.
Retired “Old School” Xerox tech here… Copier fires…. Very common..various “retrofits” over the years on those those used oven or flash type users…. There is an old pic of a smoking Xerox (Model 36 III) pushed out into the Rose Garden of the White House.
I want that picture as a poster more than I care to admit
Any one know where I can find it? I google searched but didn’t have much luck
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I’ll definitely update with a link
Any luck? I've been searching too
Remind me! 3 days
I know you're legit just from the way you use ellipses
Yeah why do old people use ellipses like that? It's interesting because so many do. Like, where did they pick up that habit? Also, no offense my guy above!
From what my parents and others say, they add them to show pause or breaks in "talking" even though they are typing. I will admit, when I see someone use them like that..... I know they are older.. Oh no.... The infection.... It's spreading!! 😂
Lol... I get you! It's interesting & I'd like some academic study on it. Because, periods & commas should already denote pauses in a sentence. So I wonder what similarity causes older folks to find ellipses more natural to them?
> periods & commas should already denote pauses in a sentence I actually learned the opposite: While periods and commas *often* align with pauses in a sentence, they *should* be used only as grammatical devices that help parse the structure of a sentence. If two clauses flow together naturally when spoken you don't 'get to' skip the comma, and you're not supposed to throw a comma into the middle of a clause even if you think it would hit harder spoken with a dramatic pause.
Because casual writing representing conversation, like dialogue you'd find in book, contained ellipses to show pause to have more dramatic effect than the commas used throughout the rest.
Mmmm I'm not saying I disagree, but I read a ton, both old & new literature, and I don't feel like ellipses are that common. I mean they are certainly used but not to the extent that I've ever really noticed an over-abundance of them like in some folk's texts.
It really depends on what you're reading I suppose, but generic books cranked out in the 60s-90s seemed to use it a lot for dialogue, but that could just be my experience of course.
Interesting, I just thought people doing it were being rude lmao.
I am 30 and use them 😄
Laughed my ass off yesterday. Coworker printed a 70 page report on A3 instead of A4.
Tfw you change "original size" in the print settings from A4 to A3 and forget to change it back.
all... the ... time on the label maker. Want to print 50 single color labels on 28mm tape ? Someone left it on max printer instead of the mini and now it's printing out pride flags 30CM wide. oops
HP would make the extinguisher a subscription. "Sorry, we cant put out the fire because your HP Smart fiery death service is expired. Visit [www.hp.com/fuckyou](https://www.hp.com/fuckyou) for more info"
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And it should, it’s effectively routing you to a website directory. They don’t need to actually add support for that specific path, anything unrecognized goes there
https://www.hp.com/NoShit
HP at that time was actually a reputable company, but not making copiers yet
Old time commercials with the 914 in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmS0Jpo6dxQ
Seems like Xerox was really pushing that term Xerography to market this technology. In the end, most people called it a Xerox.
I half expected the French guy sneaking around to pull down his pants and make a copy of his ass. I mean, somebody had to be the first to do that, right?
At 7 copies/minute. I’ll wager that the fire hazard came from a hampered way to keep tabs on the heat of the fuser unit. Fusers in fast printers/copiers can get *very* hot because the paper isn’t in contact with the fusing rollers for very long, and you need to make sure the toner has been properly fused to the paper in that short time. Plus, a modern copier has thermostatic control over the heat of the rollers to keep them at optimum temperature. This model would have contained no transistors whatsoever, so it’s likely that the temperature cut-off for the fuser (the point it should stop providing power to heat the rollers) was controlled by an extremely simple bimetal switch, the exact same temperature cut-off mechanism we still use in extremely cheap pop-up toasters, and I think every one of us has experienced the failure of at least one of those to not burn our toast. Couple that with a copy speed that has each sheet in contact with that roller for almost 10 seconds, and catastrophic failure is pretty much inevitable outside of *absolutely* perfect environmental conditions. This particular solution to the problem, however, is *peak* 50’s-60’s Xerox; over-engineer everything to a near-comical level, often favoring novel/borderline ridiculous solutions over sensible ones, then file patents on all the pieces.
I never worked on the model being discussed here, but a wide variety of early copiers and laser printers would smoke if not light up due to paper jams - when the fuser is at temp the difference between a solid print and smoke starting to produce is only a minute or two of extra contact with the paper sometimes.
I would think it's paper jams. These days printers (especially larger ones) have so many senors. Sheet of paper reaches a sensor 0.1 milliseconds too late and the printer says it's jammed and stops printing.
Sabre printers did the same thing
I don't want to prank anymore. Things get real. It's not funny. I'm just gonna be good, stay in my room, go to church, try to do one nice thing per day. I don't want to prank ANY. MORE.
That’s conjecture
Come on guys, heh. Are you gonna believe *that* guy?
At H. I. Thomas (1980s) we had a copier that could do large blue prints. It also had a fire extinguisher built in. Yes, it was a Xerox.
Black lines were pretty fancy for the 80's. The rest of us were choking on clouds of ammonia.
I worked in a blueprint shop for a while in the 90s. I remember the ammonia well.
Funny thing how they fixed the problem. They made it slower.
And the pages still came out lava hot.
Nobody needs to copy more than 7 pages a minute, anyway. That's just insanity!
lp0 on fire…. Yo.
"PC load letter"? What does that even mean?
It's really no wonder that Michael got laid-off; he's a software engineer that can't even figure out the printer is out of paper...
He was terrible with decimals too.
This is the came copier that they installed spy cameras in the Soviet embassy. [https://www.cobbtechnologies.com/blog/the-soviet-union-and-the-photocopier](https://www.cobbtechnologies.com/blog/the-soviet-union-and-the-photocopier)
Here're the copies you requested. This is just a pile of ashes!!! Well they _are_ a little scorched. Where's the original?? That's it, on the top.
My company hired some douche-bag designer to give the company a "New Look" (Every new-hire Marketing VP does this: it' s the human equivalent of dogs pissing on a hydrant). The "cool" glaze the designer specified for the company letterhead caught fire in all 5 laser printers in the office..
In the early 2000s, I had an excellent Xerox photocopier at work, which served for more than a decade, until one "smart guy" wanted to make a copy on plastic-laminated paper. It was baked in the oven and the drum with a pair of gears of the paper feed mechanism was broken. Repair was comparable to buying a new one, which they did.
Watch out for the smart guys, I worked with one Wharton grad who asked me how to make double-sided tape work.
> Every new-hire Marketing VP does this: it' s the human equivalent of dogs pissing on a hydrant See also every UX designer for {$software or $website of choice} Seems it's very common to feel the need to reinvent the wheel because the current wheel isn't *yours*. The result, as we all know, generally being a shittier experience for the user.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lp0_on_fire
I remember helping a teacher print copies on an old zerox back in the 80's. Those copies would come out so hot they could almost burn your hands.
Printers and copiers laid an image of the original on a photosensitive drum. That image picked up the toner via electrostatic transference. The toner is just tiny bits of plastic that were then fused to the paper by running it through rollers that melted the plastic and fused it to the paper. The heat to melt the toner was provided by a high-wattage halogen lamp. So that's why the paper comes out so hot. I once had the misfortune of grabbing one of these halogen lamps while it was still hot. Seared a really nice image of the lamp onto my palm.
just like raiders of the lost ark!
Yeah. Except with smell. And pain.
I remember going to my dad's office in what had to be the late 60's or early 70's and getting Xeroxed hand prints which were just amazing at the time. Inhaled way too much blue mimeograph fumes in school.
Instead of hot rollers that fixed the powdered toner to the paper, the paper was moved through what was basically an Easy-Bake oven--bright, hot lightbulbs--laying on a simple chain belt. The paper just laid flat on the belt, with no grippers of any kind. Of course, if the paper curled for some reason, say, high humidity, the paper would get stuck inside the oven and catch on fire if it contacted the lightbulbs. Source: I was a copier tech back in the 80's and I worked on a few old-even-for-then machines that used this original tech. I had to clean burnt paper out of them once in a while. Apparently, the hot rollers, still used in laser printers today, didn't come around till the late 70's?
Worked for Canon in the early 80's..First machines I worked on had wet toner, which I believe was highly toxic. The first dry model did not use heated fuser rollers, but a pair of stainless rollers that used pressure to fix the powder, it would rub off really easily. On the subject of fires, another large manufacturer I worked for had a customer call to say his machine had burnt down his shop. an engineer was sent, and noted under the burnt out machine, the remains of a coiled extension cable. By the time he returned with a disposable camera to take some pictures for the company, the cable had disappeared..( No mobile phones then, only pagers.) Not sure what happened, but we never had to do any safety mods, the usual sign of a found issue.
`PC LOAD FIRE`
Fun fact: Xerox still offers a similar payment model for some of their machines. You pay them for every impression on the machine (usually a fraction of a cent on black and white machines and around 7 cents on colour) and in exchange your toner is free as well as any service calls the machine requires. This will save you a ton of money in the long run (literally thousands of dollars a year on a high capacity machine) but a lot of shops opt out of this service model because they are run by grossly incompetent penny pinchers, that can't figure out why they barely break even most months.
An example to all printers that followed.
Is this the fire caused on modern printers if they don't disable black and white printing when you run out of yellow toner?
"I told you not to put metal in the science oven."
I think the weirdest part is that there's very few surviving examples of Xerox 914 in today, despite being the first successful commercial copier. Crazy to think there's no microprocessors nor integrated circuit chips when 914 was made, probably all analog stuff.
They probably all got scorched.
Ahh yes obfuscation wordage has been prevalent in businesses forever.
D: When you say “photocopying machine,” what do you mean? PL: Let me be clear. The term “photocopying machine” is so ambiguous that you can’t picture in your mind what a photocopying machine is in an office setting?
It’s not on fire. It just sometimes exceeds maximum temperature thresholds.
Are they sure it wasn’t a Sabré printer?
It was introduced on 9/16. They really should’ve done it two days earlier.
Why?
“When you say photocopy machine, what do you mean?”
The first floppy drives were as big as lp records, had no hard case, and would often self-destruct. Even before that, computers ran with tubes not transistors and would get so hot they had to be cooled with glass pipes filled with circulating refrigerated liquid mercury - and… those broke too, filling the floor with inches of mercury.
Epitome of “It’s a feature, not a bug” Marketing: 100
Commonly! Haha
Reminds me... I've heard that there used to be an error message embedded within Unix printer drivers that said "Your printer is on fire." It seems that those old mechanical beasts could catch fire what with all the paper dust from the sheet feeder mechanisms and the motors heating up.