I worked for Xerox in 1979-1980. I saw first-hand how the general Xerox organization was too copier-focused to appreciate the treasure they had at PARC. It's ir

I worked for Xerox in 1979-1980. I saw first-hand how the general Xerox organization was too copier-focused to appreciate the treasure they had at PARC. It's ironic that every new hire was given a copy of "The Billions Nobody Wanted" (by John H. Dessauer), a bio of Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography. At the top, Xerox saw the "paperless office" as a threat to their copier business. They denied my company access to the technical information we needed to make full use of the $500K ($1.7M today) laser printer we bought from them. A pox on Xerox! To their credit, every branch had a terminal linked to an SDS Sigma running the Control Program V (CP-V) timesharing system. I used it to write a BASIC program to calculate optimal copier proposals for salesmen.