Happy 25th Birthday, DocuTech

Twenty-five years ago today, everything changed for your in-plant. On Oct. 2, 1990, Xerox introduced the DocuTech 135 Production Publisher, a device that single-handedly ushered in the print-on-demand era.

Over the next 10 years, most black-and-white print work shifted to the DocuTech, which could produce offset-quality copies 25 percent cheaper than offset presses, and in one-fifth the time. In-plants quickly gravitated to this new technology, recognizing its potential far sooner than their commercial counterparts.

Just how much of a breakthrough the DocuTech was can be seen in the way the New York Times described it back in 1990: "A $220,000 copier that also receives electronic images of documents from remote computers, stores them, allows them to be edited and shared over computer networks, and generates documents of print-shop quality at high speed." Clearly, this was new territory.

To learn more about the introduction of the DocuTech and its impact on the industry, read this new Xerox blog.

Blast from the past: 10 years ago, Xerox celebrated the DocuTech's 15th birthday with cake. From left: Xerox Executives Mike Kucharski, Frank Steenburgh, Tony Federico and Val Blauvelt.