When Philip Chen joined Xerox Corp. in 1967, only big companies could afford printers and scanners. Now retired and with several patents to his name, Chen developed the Xenon flash lamp printer, which he considers the “steam locomotive” of printers. He also designed an optical disc drive for the Library of Congress to store its card catalogue information, which became the predecessor of CD drives. Chen’s next big project was to come up with a low-cost image scanner (they typically cost $20,000 at that time) for a company in Taiwan called Microtek. Chen earned a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from S&T in 1965.
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