Part 1: How the Photocopier Changed the Way We Worked €”and Played

Decades before 3-D printers brought manufacturing closer to home, copiers transformed offices, politics and art

“Once, 3-D printers were expensive, elite tools wielded by high-end designers who used them to prototype products like mobile phones or airplane parts. But now they’re emerging into the mainstream: You can buy one for about $500 to $3,000, and many enthusiasts, schools and libraries already have. Sometimes they print objects they design, but you can also make copies of physical objects by “scanning” them—using your smartphone or camera to turn multiple pictures into a 3-D model, which can then be printed over and over. Do you want a copy of, say, the Auguste Rodin statue Cariatide à l’urne—or maybe just some replacement plastic game pieces for Settlers of Catan? You’re in luck. Helpful folks have already scanned these objects and put them online.

As 3-D printing gets cheaper and cheaper, how will it change society? What will it mean to be able to save and share physical objects—and make as many copies as we’d like? One way to ponder that is to consider the remarkable impact of the first technology that let everyday people duplicate things en masse: The Xerox photocopier…..”

And here is the fandom angle -  fans in the 1990s used industrial sized work/university copiers to make copies of slash fanfic. How many times did *that* page with the explicit sex scene get stuck in the copier and how many burns did we suffer trying to pull it out from the machine with its metal parts made so hot because we had copied thousands of pages…..well, I can’t tell because I was never there (cough cough)

Back to the article….

“Copying also infected everyday life. Employees would sneak their own personal items on the machine, copying their IRS returns, party invitations, recipes. Chain letters began demanding participants not only forward the letter, but send out 20 copies—because, hey, now anyone could! And people quickly realized they could make paper replicas of physical objects, placing their hands—or, whipping down their pants, their rear ends—on the copier glass. This copying of objects could be put to curiously practical purposes. Instead of describing the physical contents of a perp’s pockets when jailing him, police would just dump them onto the 914’s glass and hit copy.The bizarre welter of things being replicated made even the folks at Xerox worry they had unleashed Promethean forces. “Have we really made a contribution by making it easier to reproduce junk and nonsense?”…”

If they only knew. Well maybe they did. Fan fic readers and writers are everywhere. Even the “folks at Xerox” I bet.