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Saturday, December 28, 2013

Students check out the Information Electronic Avenue on a Xerox computer, circa 1980. Photo: PARC

The Electronic Avenue: How Xerox Predicted the Internet With a Broadway Show Tune

It’s no secret that Xerox helped invent the modern computer. At the famed Palo Alto Research Center, Xerox researchers dreamt up everything from the graphical user interface and laser printing to object-oriented programming and Ethernet networking. What you may not realize that the company predicted its own revolutionary genius with a toe-tapping show tune.
The tune was called “Bit by Bit,” and it was part of a Broadway-style industrial musical Xerox put together in 1971, drawing on the talents of songwriting duo Wilson Stone and David Blomquist. Three years before the invention of Ethernet, the song envisioned an “electronic avenue” that sounds an awful lot like the modern internet:
It grows and grows, bit by bit
Flows on an electronic avenue,
Building information, that is what we do, Bringing tomorrow to you.
Plug-in computers and copy devices, Words and pictures combined
Graphics plus optics, reduplication, Xerox is stretching your mind!
The musical was called “Take It From Here,” and it was produced on March 31, 1971 during a Xerox sales meeting at the Breakers hotel in Palm Beach, Florida. As detailed in the new book Everything’s Coming up Profits, industrial musicals were commonplace in the ’50s, ’60s, and on into the ’70s and ’80s, but if you’re a tech lover, it doesn’t get any better than “Bit by Bit.”
The song’s lyrics were probably mapped out by Xerox’s marketing department, says Steve Young, one of the authors of Everything’s Coming Up Profits. In the number, Charlie — the show’s main character — takes the stage to explain information architecture. “He says information can be built like a house,” Young says. “With the entire cast joining him he sets forth this concept in the form of a rock and roll song.”
It’s the kind of goofy set-up that’s typical of these industrial musicals. But still, the “Bit by Bit” lyrics offer “a remarkable glimpse of where technology would take us,” says Young.
Sadly, Xerox wasn’t the company to actually take there. As any student of computer history knows, its seminal inventions remade the world largely under the wing of other companies, including Apple and Microsoft.
Xerox’s 1971 song is even more remarkable when you consider that 20 years later, the company seemed to have a far muddier vision of the future of computing. This Xerox jingle, also entitled “Bit by Bit,” leaves the electronic avenue far behind:The industrial musicals were produced by a who’s who of the mid-century Fortune 500. General Electric went all Broadway in 1956 with “It’s a Great New Line!” American Standard gave us the unforgettable 1969 show, “The Bathrooms Are Coming.” And Exxon went whole-hog with 1979′s “Put Yourself in Their Shoes.” Just to name a few.Young says he thought that the industrial musical was extinct, but since publishing the book, he’s heard that 21st Century versions of these shows have been put on in recent years by companies such as McDonald’s and State Farm. We can’t wait to hear them. But nothing could ever match “Monroe Man” — and it won’t get anywhere close the Electric Avenue.

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