Xerox Celebrates 25th Anniversary of DocuTech 135, Which Began Print-on-Demand

NORWALK, Conn.—October 2, 2015—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.