—Carver Mead, 1979 (employee at Xerox PARC), discussing why Xerox needed to focus more on adopting integrated circuits into the computers they had already developed, instead of continuing to just make increasingly-obsolete copiers.
----
"Xerox's top executives were for the most part salesmen of copy machines. From these leased behemoths the revenue stream was as tangible as the `click` of the meters counting off copies, for which the customer paid Xerox so many cents per page (and from which Xerox paid its salespersons their commissions). Noticing their eyes narrow [at R&D's attempts at asking to market their computer, one] could almost hear them thinking: 'If there is no paper to be copied, where's the `click`?' In other words: 'How will I get paid?' "
—Michael Hiltzik's "Dealers of Lightning" (p272)