Discussion

By Joe Treacy on Oct 15, 2023

Thanks, Frank.

I get to work sometimes with a recent Xerox copier which has half its controls onscreen, and the other half on a physical keypad immediately below. It’s maddening. And their Mac printer driver to access 13x19” paper is unnecessarily convoluted.

It’s kind of incredible to me that the highly inventive company that literally invented onscreen GUI iconography and yet never acted on the invention of the computer mouse, continues today, thirty plus years later, seemingly out of touch on basic copier interface design.

Interesting contrast with the forward-looking Xerox of 1976, in this video someone just posted on Instagram today:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CyLtn4_LH2O/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

By Joe Treacy on Oct 15, 2023

Thanks, Frank.

I get to work sometimes with a recent Xerox copier which has half its controls onscreen, and the other half on a physical keypad immediately below. It’s maddening. And their Mac printer driver to access 13x19” paper is unnecessarily convoluted.

It’s kind of incredible to me that the highly inventive company that literally invented onscreen GUI iconography and yet never acted on the invention of the computer mouse, continues today, thirty plus years later, seemingly out of touch on basic copier interface design.

Interesting contrast with the forward-looking Xerox of 1976, in this video someone just posted on Instagram today:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CyLtn4_LH2O/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

By HARVEY LEVENSON on Oct 16, 2023

FRANK ON TRADING SPACES
I hope that Frank Romano is recorded in perpetuity as the leading historian of the printing industry. Frank’s knowledge of the industry’s history is second to none in print or video, and through his growth and development of one of the most significant collections of industry artifacts in his Museum of Printing. Frank’s latest WhatTheyThink video on the history of the Xerox DocuTech is a further example of the position this esteemed printing industry historian and philosopher (Frank Romano) deserves. After the viewing ”Frank on Trading Spaces,” I’m reminded of one my own experiences and reflections regarding the history of the Xerox DocuTech. As a young adult growing up in Brooklyn, New York (interesting, the same borough in which Frank Romano was raised, and during the same time), I was an avid reader of the Saturday Review of Literature, one of last of the great literary publications of its time. I knew in 1961 the field in which I was going to pursue a career, the printing industry. While reading one of the weekly editions of the Saturday Review Literature, I came across a page with a cartoon having no caption and no description. It was one of those decorative images often found in such literary publications.

The cartoonist depicted the future of the printing industry, though even the cartoonist may not have realized this. It was circa 1962. The cartoon portrayed a rather large rectangular device having a series of computer tape reels. At one end sat a person feeding individual sheets of paper into it, while at the other end was being delivered fully printed and bound books; a first glimpse of the possibilities of on-demand printing. So intrigued was I by the cartoon that I cut it out and saved it, and then forgot about it.

It was nearly 30 years later when the Xerox Corporation announced its DocuTech 135 publishing system, having an eerie resemblance in looks and capabilities of an artist’s vision of nearly three decades earlier. I recalled the cartoon, and dug through a box that I carried through each of my various moves over the years, and entitled, “Brooklyn Items,” and found it. Notice the similarities to an artist’s vision nearly 30 years earlier. See:

https://hrlsite.files.wordpress.com/2023/10/sat-rev-of-lit-docutech.pdf

William Shakespeare in The Tempest wrote, what’s past is prologue. In its contemporary use, the phrase stands for the idea that history sets the context for the present.

Thomas Kuhn wrote in his acclaimed The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that old paradigms are eventually replaced with new ones when there is someone or a company brave enough to risk posing new ones (Xerox invested approximately one-billion-dollars over about ten years in developing the DocuTech).

Marshall McLuhan, in his famous Understanding Media (1964) in a chapter entitled, “The Medium Is The Message,” wrote that to get a glimpse of what the future has in store, look at what artists and fiction writers are showing and writing about today (Dick Tracy’s two-way wristwatch radio depicted in the 1940s, as did Buck Rogers comic book technologies are a few of many examples).

Indeed, the artist who depicted a device in which sheets of paper are fed in one side, and a finished, bound book comes out of the other side, had a vision of the future. I wonder what is being depicted today, by artists, cartoonists, science fiction writers, novelists and poets, that could be a forecast of the printing industry 30 years from now and beyond?