Менеджеры и менеджмент (Executives and Management). Коломейцева Е.М - 18 стр.

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2) their applications throughout the world.
Machines that make copies and send copies have become the modern offices favorite gadgets.
FAXES & COPIERS
By T. Trent Gegax
Of all the electronic gadgetry in today's office, the PC is the most important and widely used. No-brainer, right?
Only if PC means "photocopier." The personal computer doesn't even rank second. That distinction belongs to the fax.
Now here's another surprise: after the telephone, the fax is the most important modern office innovation to be created in
the 19th century. Alexander Bain, a hard-drinking Scot, patented the first fax process in 1843. As a schoolboy, Bain
scored poorly and obsessed on clocks. After he moved to London, he developed the so-called master-slave mechanism,
which, among other things, synchronized systems of school clocks. Bain's synchronization skills were indispensable for
early fax technology. It required the transmitter of an image to send, via precisely timed telegraphy, successive lines of
the image to a receiver, which were then reassembled at the exact same speed with the help of electromagnetic pendu-
lums. Nearly a century later, the idea for "electrophotography" came to Chester Carlson, a poor Caltech grad working in
a New York City patent office. It was 1934, and Carlson found himself in constant need of duplicate copies of patent
specifications. Loath to hand-copy everything, he set about saving himself time. Since he knew that large companies
were already exploring photographic and chemical copy processes, he turned his apartment into an electrostatics labora-
tory. It took Carlson four years to hit pay dirt. His first photocopied message: "10-22-38 ASTORIA."
Carlson sold his
idea to a New York firm that wanted an exotic name for its new process. A consultant, William Robert Jones, an Ohio
State University classics professor, chose the Greek word for "dry writing": xerography. A decade later, the company
renamed itself Xerox. Its breakthrough 914, a 650-pound monster that cost $29, 500, debuted in 1960. By the 1970s
Xerox had permeated corporate America.
As the copier bloomed, the much older fax finally began taking root. The first commercial fax machine, then
called long-distance xerography, went into service in 1964. The fax boom began in 1980, when the price dropped below
$2, 000 and a digital standard made it possible to network all faxes worldwide. Between 1985 and 1990, fax machines
proliferated – from 500,000 to 5 million. Federal Express tried to capitalize on the technology with ZAP Mail, a heavily
promoted, high-speed fax service. It was a disaster, costing the company $300 million, says Jonathan Coopersmith, a
tech history professor at Texas A&M. "But in the process," he says, "it popularized the fax machine."
Both pieces of equipment have played small roles in historical dramas. In 1962 the CIA used a Xerox repairman to
mount an 8-mm movie camera inside the Xerox 914 at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D. C. For its part, the fax
has developed into a propaganda tool for democratic movements. During the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstration,
Chinese students in the United States faxed pro-democracy manifestoes to random Chinese fax numbers. Mikhail Gor-
bachev beat back a coup attempt in 1991 with the help of Russian citizens who faxed updates to the Voice of America
that in turn were read back over the airwaves to millions of Russians.
Though they seem indispensable to modern life, the fax and photocopier may have begun their inevitable decline.
Some experts predict that e-mail and the Web will make the fax and photocopier redundant. But not for another
two decades, predicts Columbia University's Michael van Biema. "We have this view of America being cutting edge,"
he says. "But an awfully large number of our documents still take four days to get from A to B by way of the U. S.
mail."
T a s k 9. Listening comprehension.
A. Listen to the first and second conversations and define what the products are.
B. Point out the clues that helped you to understand what it is.
C. Listen to the third conversation and give a hands-on-demonstration of the alarm.
Conversation #1
Woman: OK, Bob. So first of all, you make sure that's there's paper.
Man: Yeah, uhuh.
Woman: Yes, fine … there. And then you put the document down. Face
down.
Man: Mhm.
Woman: Right. And then you indicate in the digital display here how
many copies you want.
Man: Mhm.
Woman: So that's …what? Two. We want two.
Man: Fine.
Woman: And then you pressed the button.
Man: Easy as that?
Woman: Yeah.
Conversation #2

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