“The second television commercial produced by Xerox for the 914 featured a trained chimpanzee using the copier. The day after the commercial debuted, the company received calls from angry customers complaining of co-workers leaving bananas on the copier and suggesting that a monkey could do their jobs. The commercial was taken off the air.[1]”
> One writer has assessed that the popularity of the machine has had a number of lasting impacts, such as prompting the introduction of highlighter pens, and university courses switching from reading lists of single chapters from several books, each of which needed to be purchased by the student, to requiring the students to purchase a single compilation of those chapters produced by local copy shops.[4]
I wish I wasn’t required to get all new editions in college (the older editions had different problem sets)
> The Xerox 914 was produced between 1960 and 1977.[4] It was introduced to the public on September 16, 1959, in a demonstration at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in New York, shown on live television.[1] One of the two copiers that were present that day caught fire.[1]
Wait, what?
> The machine was mechanically complex. It required a large technical support force,[2] and had a tendency to catch fire when overheated. Because of the problem, the Xerox company provided a "scorch eliminator", which was actually a small fire extinguisher, along with the copier.[1] Ralph Nader was among those to complain about the copier fires, reporting that the machine at his office in Washington had caught fire three times in four months.
I guess it was a different time? Or the product so immensely useful, that people did oversee that danger?
The target audience of this demo were all people born before World War II - most of them growing up in the 1920s and/or 1930s. For adults in year 1960, the whole concept of electrical appliance - whether at home and in the office - was something new. Magic being created in front of their eyes. We are talking about people who remember a telephone first appearing in their community, many probably even remembering electricity first appearing in their community.
So yeah, it definitely was a different time. Most of the things we see around us - the tools, the appliances, the materials themselves, were all developed during their youth and adult years. They and their parents were the two generations that created modernity - this was not just the time of electrification, but also chemical revolution, general automation, the time shamanism turned into medicine. Theirs was the time where all the pieces fell into place, and they were the ones to make humanity jump from a pile of farmers playing with coal and steam, to a technological civilization that sent people to the Moon. All in under a century.
Regulatory frameworks and operational principles and safety standards? Yes, they were all also being developed back then, as part of playing fast and loose with all the new wonders, and figuring how to handle them safely along the way. The guy to complain their new copier caught fire three times in four months? That would be the equivalent of today's person complaining their fancy new self-driving industrial cargo carrier robot self-drove itself into a tree while parking. Sure, the tech is not ready yet for the general population, but it can be used safely when operated with care and forward thinking.
It is impossible to overstate how important/useful Xerox copiers were to offices (and anyone else who needed to make copies on small scale, e.g. schoolteachers, churches, zine authors, ...). The previous state of the art was
They made and aired a 90 second ad which could have showed the entire process uncut, but they wasted a lot of the ad time with pointless filler of a little girl walking around and whatnot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7gxp9JKqDQ
Back then, it was an important aspect of ads that they were self-contained, pleasing stories. They sold products by becoming a cultural reference. Also, the rather abstract, but still charming scene (the girl walking by the chairs, and wandering on) not only adds to the development of the story, but also adds a style and production value, which not only separates the spot from what came before and what came after, but which – at the best of times – becomes also associated with the product. It's probably the essential pivot of the spot, establishing style, pace, and mood, and by this claim. Showing the copier running for a minute in real-time couldn't have achieved any of this, and it wouldn't have conveyed a great message either, when there were already wet process offset copiers running 50, maybe even 150 copies a minute. Also mind that these wet processes were much more complex, requiring specialist jobs, organisation, etc., something that the story, namely, "a little girl does it on her own in a minute", brings home.
Because watching a copier from 1959 actually, literally take 40-odd seconds to make one copy in real time is boring, even if it was novel for the time. The ad's runtime took as much time as the copier, which was the point.
Why Taken? I was a moviegoer well before the Taken series, and people (normal people) were definitely aware of cuts. In particular they’d come up in conversation with action movies, or any movie where a music video director made the leap to films.
It's a joke - there was a very well known scene where I think they cut 15 times in 5-10 seconds to show Liam Neeson jumping a fence. (Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by4UZ-79MK4 )
I'd say moviegoers were more aware of filmmaking starting in the 80s, and most people know about complex things like green screens and the like today.
I'm trying to think of the last time a product came out and the public and government's response was "That's so amazing, it has to be fraud", but it was legitimate. I'm a little tired, so all I'm drawing is a blank.
That's been a very common reaction to many deep learning successes the past few years. I lost track of how many people seriously suggested that a GPT-3 output might be some outsourced laborer in realtime, never mind how fast the output came back for arbitrary inputs!
If we're talking about general reactions of serious (and supposedly serious) people, and not just government (as per GP's question), then SpaceX reusable rockets also qualify - I remember people were still arguing that physics makes it infeasible, some even saying fundamentally impossible, for some time after the first successful landing of a booster in a regular launch (and not a test).
(Ironically, this briefly turning into some kind of conspiracy thing was likely fueled in large part because SpaceX couldn't get something else right: their live streaming setup. Even a a year later, the streaming still tended to cut off exactly as the booster was about to land, and resumed with it either in pieces, or safely on the pad. This was a big problem with barge landings in particular - where IIRC the primary explanation was that they just couldn't keep the antenna pointed in the right direction with all the shaking induced by the booster's hoverslam.)
(And yes, I appreciate the irony of getting hung up over live streamed booster landing, as if it was common and expected practice.)
Reminds me when Samsonite (who made luggage) did a commercial showing what happened to your luggage at the airport when it went on the conveyor belt. The belt passed through a large cage with a gorilla in it, who threw the luggage around until it exited on the conveyor belt. The idea was the luggage was tough enough to withstand the airline baggage handlers.
The airlines, of course, were furious, and the commercial quickly disappeared.
I believe that this commercial was quite close to reality.
I have seen several times, in various airports, how the baggage handlers were throwing the luggage in a carrying vehicle from several meters distance, instead of going closer and just putting it down.
After seeing such a scene for the first time I have never put anything fragile elsewhere but in the hand-carried luggage. Even so, I have received once after a flight an apparently solid case with the part where the handle slides in being broken.
I’m pretty sure people tested this and it turned out the suitcases couldn’t actually withstand elephants standing on them and that was the reason they discontinued the ads.
My favorite Xerox commercial showed a monk in a monastery given the job of laboriously copying books by hand (a major task of monks in medieval days). The monk receives a Xerox machine, and rolls his eyes upward to thank heaven.
It's hard to overestimate the productivity increase of the Xerox machine.
In the 50s Bedtime for Bonzo was still in the public conciousness, and that popularity of chimps on screen continued. Nobody knew for sure that we were so close to the chimps genetically but everyone was suspecting that, hence so much curiosity. Remember it was still before Jane Goodall
Maybe they start feeding you longer ads if you don't skip them? I never skip (but I don't watch much of Youtube, either), just turn the volume down to zero.
Yeah, some ads are about 6s. Many are 15-30s. Some are around 1 minute. Several have been about 5 minutes, this seems actually quite common. The longest I've seen was about 2 hours and 10 minutes.
What I really meant was that it depends on the context. Imagine a family gathered around the TV set, with some rather conventional (as in "boring") series or the multiple hours long Saturday evening show. Where – in the absence of greater sensations – the message is mostly the medium, the spot (as a short, self-contained, often engaging and pleasing story) is a delight! Now, on a format like YT, even a 15 seconds ad is much more invasive, and ads and ad blocks are becoming even longer than this. Moreover, in a context where you switch rather short snippets of content on your own initiative, ads are generally invasive, while the are competing for attention. By this, what was once a cultural reference has become entirely meaningless to the potential consumer: it's just an annoyance, by which you pay for the service.
Not, it’s clearly not him. I can tell by the pixels, and from seeing quite a few pictures and videos of Engelbart in my time. Just kidding, but even the voice is different.
> Apes emerged within monkeys as sister of the Cercopithecidae in the Catarrhini, so cladistically they are monkeys as well. However, there has been resistance to directly designate apes (and thus humans) as monkeys, so "Old World monkey" may be taken to mean either the Cercopithecoidea (not including apes) or the Catarrhini (including apes).
This distinction doesn't exist in French. There's probably an interesting story explaining why the English language had to distinguish monkeys with a tail and monkeys without one.
“The second television commercial produced by Xerox for the 914 featured a trained chimpanzee using the copier. The day after the commercial debuted, the company received calls from angry customers complaining of co-workers leaving bananas on the copier and suggesting that a monkey could do their jobs. The commercial was taken off the air.[1]”
[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=ZYurhbUh_2gC&pg=PA61