Fear and naivete are powerful motivators, catalyzing these early innovations. More often the realities of budget, politics, and competing priorities hampers the same creative energies.
If there wasn't a more compelling reason for higher taxes on those who can pay more should... It just goes to show that there's always someone dumb with more money than they know what to do with that's willing to dump it into making more people dumb.
Mimeograph aka spirit duplicator used a stencil that you could write on or type on and then use alcohol to then dissolve the raised part of the stencil and transfer it onto the paper. It worked well for simple stuff but kinda poorly for halftones and could prob only provide 300 copies before you'd need a new stencil.
Xerographic from Greek "dry writing" differs in that you use a fine powder (toner) that can be electrostatically charged and then drawn to paper using a light-sensitive drum.
The genius of the AM machine is that it could be used to print on practically any medium including metal, dogtags were printed in this way. Also, data could be saved in either punchcard format or later electronically. The last big use was for imprinting credit cards.
All that was needed to make a Selectric into a terminal was essentially a box to take the electrical signals of hitting the keys (that triggered the correct letter on the ball to strike the ribbon) and amplify/send them to an interface into a device that could take TTY. Early word-processors and cold-type machines used this since those Selectrics were ubiquitous and dang durable.
A&M (later A&M Intl to sound more sophisticated) made some interesting equipment from its various divisions. Their Multigraph division long made duplicators for secretaries etc. They also introduced an office copier that sorta functioned like what Xerox came up with but minus the Xerographic process (sorta like a hybrid spirit duplicator on steroids). Like this one in this vintage ad: https://www.ebay.com/itm/274448810068. A&M's Varityper division produced some really innovative cold-type products and they were probably 3rd among the big names of the day CompuGraphic, Linotype (LinoTronic) with their Comp/Edit series of electro-mechanical typesetting gear. There was also AM Jacquard division which sold a word processing/editing setup that was seen to complement their typesetting division. I never saw one of those in person, primarily I was trained on the Varityper CompEdit and later digital version. Desktop publishing ended its existence as management didn't know how to integrate those systems into desktop publishing. Typesetting used to be an independent task, one would enter the text into a composition system where it could be edited and manipulated for page, letter, word, and character spacing depending upon the medium of output. DP combined all those functions and allowed you to WYSIWYG it before even printing it out. Linotype survived a little while longer with their system the Linotronic because they knew that essentially if they made a "printer" aka the imagesetter that outputs the films necessary for plate making they could eke out an existence (they're now owned by their longtime rival Monotype!).
I can still see in my head how to compose a line in the CompEdit, perhaps it was like a pseudo comp language in that you could specify line length, drop-cap, leading, tracking, kerning, etc all via commands. I guess the equivalent of WordPerfect's codes but with maximum strength.
