By Graham K. Rogers

Xerox Corporation have reminded us in a press release that it was 75 years ago this week (22 October) that Chester Carlson created the first xerographic image in a rented apartment in Queens, N.Y.

The information from Xerox tells us that Carlson who was trained as a physicist and lawyer was "a serial inventor", but it was this xerographic process that is still at the heart of most office printers and copiers around the world and which led to the founding of the Xerox Corporation.

The Xerox machine fundamentally changed how a lot of business has been done ever since. The company itself was responsible for many new inventions, particularly from its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where the mouse, the GUI and Ethernet were initially developed.

For more information about Xerox and some of the events they have planned for the next few months related to this anniversary, the press release is online.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand where he is also Assistant Dean. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.