How many people work in your office? 10? Maybe 20? Maybe more? Well, that really doesn’t matter. The point I am trying to get to is how many printers do you have in your office? Surely a lot less than the number of people working there right? In fact, if you were to compare your present day office to the offices of yore, the one stark difference would be in the number of gadgets earlier offices had. Earlier offices typically had a printer for each user, a fax machine for every couple of users, a scanner per head and maybe even a large copier that everyone took turns using. All that however changed when all in one printers came into being.

What is that you ask? Well, all in one printers are just that – all in one printers. In addition to printing, they also offer the functionality of scanning, copying and faxing – all in the same gadget. How exactly did this revolution in office ergonomics come about? Well, in order to understand that, we must take a look at how the all in one printers evolved in the first place. Originally all in one printers started off being just printers. But then someone came up with the idea of integrating the printer with a closer relative – the copier. And thus was born the printer-copier.

Then of course technology took things a step further by including the scanner in the works. The printer technology resources were added up again, thus was born the multi functional printer, copier and scanner. And when the last brainwave of adding the fax machine to the combination struck someone, the all in one printer had truly arrived. Along the way, the all in one printer or the multi functional printer as it is commonly known got networking capabilities, integrated color management abilities and even security features. Which meant that administrative people could not just control the supplies, they could also control who used what function.

The final icing on the case of the all in one printer was when e-mail capabilities were added to the already enhanced offerings of the printer. This made the humble printer of yore an almost super printer – or a truly all in one printer! And this is what has enabled your smaller but more spacious office to get that way. Thanks to the removal of all the multiple gadgets with single functionality and to have replaced them with a single gadget with multiple functionality. All in one printers have changed the way we look at gadgets today. And who knows what else could be added to them in the days to come!