The Timelines
Four technologies, 1990→2026, as geometry
Four lines through thirty-six years
The briefcase filed machines, not time. A brochure told you what a copier was; only distance tells you what it was becoming, and the four lines on these pages are what the collection looks like when it is filed by distance instead. Each line begins in the years when the collector was telephoning salesmen, and ends in a present the salesmen would not recognise — though they would recognise the salesmanship, which is the point of the fourth line.
Every dated point is in the register's files with a source attached; the one approximate date is labelled as such, because the analog copier was never given a funeral — production simply stopped, sometime around 2004, while everyone was watching the network stack. Read the lines separately for the facts. Read them together for the story: the machine kept getting better while the industry kept getting smaller, and neither line ever paused to consult the other.
What the four lines say when read together
Engineering never stopped advancing; ownership never stopped concentrating; the console never stopped promising thought. Draw them on one chart and the industry's whole character appears: relentless improvement, administered by ever fewer hands, described in ever grander adjectives. The register finds this consistent with everything else in its files.