Chow for paragraph eater. I should have known there was a white-paper on the Lyon's mouse. Lyon was mostly working on chip-design methodology with Carver Mead (Introduction to VLSI Design, it was hot back in the day), and the mouse was kind of a worthwhile demo of that. We had a captive N-MOS fab and it was fairly easy for us to do multi-project chips and get custom VLSI in a run of about 10 bonded out chips or so per project for cheap.
I had the distinct pleasure of working for Tibor Fisli for a while. He and Gary Starkweather are the inventors of the laser printer, Tibor did the optics and Gary did the electronics and dragooned a couple of people for software. I distinctly remember Hal Murray (who did a *lot* of early router software) being involved. Their first model was about the size of a smart-car and would deliver 2 pages of black and white per second all day long. Big fun.
I, for one, welcome our new Cybernetic Overlords /.
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.