The 8010 and the Xerox laser printers were the exclusive territories of the OPD (Office Products Division). Since we were the RMD (Retail Markets Division), we were not permitted to sell these Xerox products without getting our hands slapped for poaching in the OPD domain. We had some customers come to us wanting to buy the 8010 because of its potential for multilingual document support. OPD wasn’t responsive to their requests, and we were chastised for talking to them about OPD’s products. This was a real shame, because we saw tremendous potential for these early laser printers and 8010 systems helping our business customers. Unfortunately, the customers directed to OPD kept coming back with the complaint that OPD couldn’t sell them the laser printers they wanted for one reason and another. Xerox ultimately spun our RMD off to become Genra Group, and we sold and installed the first Hewlett Packard HP Laserjet 500 Plus printers, while the Xerox laser printers remained off limits to us.
Yes, Mother X worked really hard to urinate away a mountain of money generated by a 20 year patent monopoly on xerography. The tales are legendary in their awesomeness.
At PARC, the canonical term for management back East was “toner-head”, a noun. As in “Liddle David wasn’t a tonerhead, but he spent enough time in Rochester to pick up the disease.”