He saw the promise of Carlson's invention and, in 1946, signed an agreement to develop it as a commercial product. Wilson, credited as the 'founder of Xerox', took over Haloid from his father. However, it would take more than 20 years of refinement before the first automated machine to make copies was commercialized, using a document feeder, scanning light, and a rotating drum. In 1938, Chester Carlson, a physicist working independently, invented a process for printing images using an electrically charged photoconductor-coated metal plate and dry powder 'toner'. It manufactured photographic paper and equipment. Xerox was founded in 1906 in Rochester, New York, as The Haloid Photographic Company. Researchers at Xerox and its Palo Alto Research Center invented several important elements of personal computing, such as the desktop metaphor GUI, the computer mouse and desktop computing. Xerox focuses on its document technology and document outsourcing business, and traded on the NYSE from 1961 to 2021, and the Nasdaq since 2021. On December 31, 2016, Xerox separated its business process service operations, essentially those operations acquired with the purchase of Affiliated Computer Services, into a new publicly traded company, Conduent. As a large developed company, it is consistently placed in the list of Fortune 500 companies.

The company purchased Affiliated Computer Services for $6.4 billion in early 2010. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (having moved from Stamford, Connecticut, in October 2007), though it is incorporated in New York with its largest population of employees based around Rochester, New York, the area in which the company was founded. Xerox Holdings Corporation ( / ˈ z ɪər ɒ k s/ also known simply as Xerox) is an American corporation that sells print and digital document products and services in more than 160 countries.

Free ocr software brother scanner