NEW YORK (Fortune) -- Long before digital tools such as listservs, e-mail blasts, and even Facebook enabled us to easily broadcast messages, photocopies were the most efficient way to distribute information to groups of all sizes.
If the boss needed to discuss a new company policy, workers got memos in their (physical) in-boxes or slipped under their office doors. Community newsletters, fliers for parties, and the oft-maligned Christmas letters in holiday cards were all made possible by the automated copying machine, which made its commercial debut 50 years ago.
"It was a democratizing technology," says Stephen P. Hoover, vice president of global software solutions for Xerox (XRX, Fortune 500). Xerox's 914 copier -- so named because it could copy a 9-by-14-inch document at a rate of seven copies per minute -- "gave people access to information and capabilities they just didn't have. It really changed how work was done."
Indeed, in announcing the 914 on September 16, 1959, Joseph C. Wilson, president of the company then known as Haloid Xerox Co. ("Haloid" was dropped in 1961), said in a news release: "Our girls [read: secretaries] love to use the 914 and have discovered many new copying jobs for it to do. For example, rather than type a complicated page full of statistics requiring nine or ten carbons, they have found it much faster to type the information on a single sheet and make copies on the 914. Thus they avoid the annoying, time- consuming job of correcting errors on nine or ten sheets separated by carbons.
"Besides, they feel great pride when their copies all look like originals."....
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