Hi, this is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com.  This is an ad that appeared in Time Magazine March 19, 1956.  It says, "One minute is all it takes."  Scott Tildon found it.  It's for a machine from Kodak called the Verifax Copier.  It cost $240 and it made five photo exact copies of any record for two and a half cents each.  Letters, news clippings, pencil or ink records, even carbon and spirit duplicated copies can be reproduced by anyone in your office.  No change in your present office lighting.  Oh, didn't know that.

To make translucent white print masters for ten cents that you could make blueprints, whiteprints from opaque and two-sided materials.  But here's the part that I love the most.  You can make offset plates for less than 20 cents.  You can go to press in record time at low cost.

So $240 for the Verifax Copier.  If you want the offset adapter it was $60 more.  There's a coupon so you can get more information about it, but this was the beginning of the copy era.  The Xerox machine was just coming into the marketplace.  Within a few years you would start to see it in the marketplace.  Other companies started to do various things with different kinds of toners and different approaches using photography.

Some of them actually needed chemistry, which this did by the way.  So you actually had to change chemistry cartridges on a regular basis.  But before this, making a copy in an office with a machine called a thermal fax from 3M, which was a terrible device.  It took several tries to get a copy of out it.  So when these kinds of copiers came in, they started to make a real difference in the business office and that was the beginning of today's office automation.  We also have word processing, of course today we have computerization, PCs and of course it’s all different, but this is where it all started.

That's my opinion.