DISCOVERIES & INVENTIONS · 10 NOV 1977 · BOCA RATON
The chairman uncrosses his arms
November 1977, a Xerox sales conference in Boca Raton. On a mock office set flown in on two chartered jets, the company's Palo Alto laboratory demonstrates the personal computer it has already built: the screen, the mouse, the network, the laser printer. The executives cross their arms. This is the timeline where their chairman does not.
You are reading the timeline that almost was · notes marked THE RECORD are real history
10 NOV 1977 · BOCA RATON
In November 1977 Xerox gathered more than three hundred of its executives and their wives at a Florida resort for a meeting it called Futures Day. The laboratory Xerox had built in Palo Alto seven years earlier came to show what it had made. It brought the Alto, a computer for one person, with an upright screen that held a white page of black words, a pointing device its makers called a mouse, electronic mail, and a laser printer that drew with light. The team leased two DC-10s to fly twenty machines east and built mock offices with help from Hollywood. When the demonstration ran, the executives folded their arms. Only the wives, many of them once typists, leaned in and saw it.
In the timeline recorded here, the chairman does not fold his arms. C. Peter McColough had built this laboratory. Now he gives the order the men around him expect him to swallow. Ship it.
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