Xerox Star 8010 (2)
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The Xerox Star
workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term ''workstat ...
, officially named Xerox 8010 Information System, is the first commercial
personal computer A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose microcomputer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or tec ...
to incorporate technologies that have since become standard in personal computers, including a
bitmap In computing, a bitmap is a mapping from some domain (for example, a range of integers) to bits. It is also called a bit array A bit array (also known as bitmask, bit map, bit set, bit string, or bit vector) is an array data structure that c ...
ped display, a window-based
graphical user interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...
,
icons An icon () is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, in the cultures of the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Catholic churches. They are not simply artworks; "an icon is a sacred image used in religious devotion". The most ...
, folders,
mouse A mouse ( : mice) is a small rodent. Characteristically, mice are known to have a pointed snout, small rounded ears, a body-length scaly tail, and a high breeding rate. The best known mouse species is the common house mouse (''Mus musculus' ...
(two-button),
Ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...
networking,
file server In computing, a file server (or fileserver) is a computer attached to a network that provides a location for shared disk access, i.e. storage of computer files (such as text, image, sound, video) that can be accessed by the workstations that are ab ...
s,
print server In computer networking, a print server, or printer server, is a type of server that connects printers to client computers over a network. It accepts print jobs from the computers and sends the jobs to the appropriate printers, queuing the jobs local ...
s, and
e-mail Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...
. Introduced by
Xerox Corporation Xerox Holdings Corporation (; also known simply as Xerox) is an American corporation that sells print and digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (having moved from Stam ...
on April 27, 1981, the name ''Star'' technically refers only to the software sold with the system for the
office automation Office automation refers to the varied computer machinery and software used to digitally create, collect, store, manipulate, and relay office information needed for accomplishing basic tasks. Raw data storage, electronic transfer, and the management ...
market. The 8010 workstations were also sold with software based on the programming languages
Lisp A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech. Types * A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lisping ...
and
Smalltalk Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed reflective programming language. It was designed and created in part for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC by Alan Ka ...
for the smaller research and
software development Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. Software development invol ...
market.


History


The Xerox Alto

The Xerox Star systems concept owes much to the
Xerox Alto The Xerox Alto is a computer designed from its inception to support an operating system based on a graphical user interface (GUI), later using the desktop metaphor. The first machines were introduced on 1 March 1973, a decade before mass-market G ...
, an experimental workstation designed by the
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center Xerox Holdings Corporation (; also known simply as Xerox) is an American corporation that sells print and digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (having moved from Stamf ...
(PARC). The first Alto became operational in 1972. The Alto had been strongly influenced by what its designers had seen previously with the NLS computer system at the
Stanford Research Institute SRI International (SRI) is an American nonprofit scientific research institute and organization headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The trustees of Stanford University established SRI in 1946 as a center of innovation to support economic d ...
and
PLATO Plato ( ; grc-gre, Πλάτων ; 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was a Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He founded the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution ...
at University of Illinois."The History of the Xerox Alto". Carl J. Clement. March, 2002. At first, only a few Altos had been built. Although by 1979 nearly 1,000 Ethernet-linked Altos had been put into operation at Xerox and another 500 at collaborating universities and government offices, it was never intended to be a commercial product. Then in 1977, Xerox started a development project which worked to incorporate the Alto innovations into a commercial product; their concept was an integrated document preparation system, centered around the (then expensive)
laser printing Laser printing is an electrostatic digital printing process. It produces high-quality text and graphics (and moderate-quality photographs) by repeatedly passing a laser beam back and forth over a negatively-charged cylinder called a "drum" to d ...
technology and oriented towards large corporations and their trading partners. When the resulting Xerox Star system was announced in 1981, the cost was about $75,000 ($ in today's dollars) for a basic system, and $16,000 ($ today) for each added workstation. A base system would have an 8010 Star workstation, and a second 8010 dedicated as a server (with RS232 I/O), and a floor-standing laser printer. The server software included a File Server, a Print Server, and distributed services (Mail Server, Clearinghouse Name Server / Directory, and Authentication Server). Customers could connect Xerox Memorywriter typewriters to this system over ethernet and send email, using the Memorywriter as a
teletype A teleprinter (teletypewriter, teletype or TTY) is an electromechanical device that can be used to send and receive typed messages through various communications channels, in both point-to-point and point-to-multipoint configurations. Initia ...
.


The Xerox Star development process

The Star was developed at Xerox's Systems Development Department (SDD) in
El Segundo, California El Segundo ( , ; ) is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. Located on Santa Monica Bay, it was incorporated on January 18, 1917, and is part of the South Bay Cities Council of Governments. The population was 16,731 as of th ...
, which had been established in 1977 under the direction of Don Massaro. A section of SDD, ''SDD North'', was located in
Palo Alto, California Palo Alto (; Spanish language, Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a Sequoia sempervirens, coastal redwood tree kno ...
, and included some people borrowed from PARC. SDD's mission was to design the "
Office of the future The office of the future is a concept dating from the 1940s. It is also known as the "paperless office". Memex desk and related machines The first practical office of the future concept was probably the series of machines which were presented in ...
", a new system that would incorporate the best features of the Alto, was easy to use, and could automate many office tasks. The development team was headed by
David Liddle David Liddle is co-founder of Interval Research Corporation, consulting professor of computer science at Stanford University. While at Xerox PARC he was credited with heading development of the Xerox Star computer system. In 1982 he co-founded Meta ...
, and would eventually grow to more than 200 developers. A good part of the first year was taken up by meetings and planning, the result of which was an extensive and detailed functional specification, internally termed the "Red Book". This became the bible for all development tasks. It defined the interface and enforced consistency in all modules and tasks. All changes to the functional specification had to be approved by a review team which maintained standards rigorously. One group in Palo Alto worked on the underlying
operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...
interface to the hardware and programming tools. Teams in El Segundo and Palo Alto collaborated on developing the user interface and user applications. The staff relied heavily on the technologies they were working on, file sharing, print servers and e-mail. They were even connected to the
Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
, then named
ARPANET The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical fou ...
, which helped them communicate between El Segundo and Palo Alto. The Star was implemented in the programming language
Mesa A mesa is an isolated, flat-topped elevation, ridge or hill, which is bounded from all sides by steep escarpments and stands distinctly above a surrounding plain. Mesas characteristically consist of flat-lying soft sedimentary rocks capped by ...
, a direct precursor to
Modula-2 Modula-2 is a structured, procedural programming language developed between 1977 and 1985/8 by Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zurich. It was created as the language for the operating system and application software of the Lilith personal workstation. It w ...
and
Modula-3 Modula-3 is a programming language conceived as a successor to an upgraded version of Modula-2 known as Modula-2+. While it has been influential in research circles (influencing the designs of languages such as Java, C#, and Python) it has not be ...
. Mesa was not
object-oriented Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of "objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or ''properties''), and the code is in the form of pro ...
, but included processes (threads) and monitors (mutexes) in the language. Mesa required creating two files for every module: a definition module specified data structures and procedures for each object, and one or more implementation modules contained the code for the procedures. Traits were a programming convention used to implement object-oriented capabilities and multiple inheritance in the Star/Viewpoint customer environment. The Star team used a sophisticated
integrated development environment An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source code editor, build automation tools a ...
(IDE), named internally ''Tajo'' and externally '' Xerox Development Environment'' (XDE). Tajo had many similarities with the
Smalltalk Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed reflective programming language. It was designed and created in part for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC by Alan Ka ...
-80 environment, but it had many added tools. For example, the
version control In software engineering, version control (also known as revision control, source control, or source code management) is a class of systems responsible for managing changes to computer programs, documents, large web sites, or other collections o ...
system DF, which required programmers to check out modules before they could be changed. Any change in a module which would force changes in dependent modules were closely tracked and documented. Changes to lower level modules required various levels of approval. The software development process was intense. It involved much
prototyping A prototype is an early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or process. It is a term used in a variety of contexts, including semantics, design, electronics, and software programming. A prototype is generally used to ...
and user testing. The
software engineers Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term '' ...
had to develop new network
communications protocol A communication protocol is a system of rules that allows two or more entities of a communications system to transmit information via any kind of variation of a physical quantity. The protocol defines the rules, syntax, semantics and synchr ...
s and data-encoding schemes when those used in PARC's research environment proved inadequate. Initially, all development was done on Alto workstations. These were not well suited to the extreme burdens placed by the software. Even the processor intended for the product proved inadequate and involved a last minute hardware redesign. Many software redesigns, rewrites, and late additions had to be made, variously based on results from user testing, and marketing and systems considerations. A
Japanese language is spoken natively by about 128 million people, primarily by Japanese people and primarily in Japan, the only country where it is the national language. Japanese belongs to the Japonic or Japanese- Ryukyuan language family. There have been ma ...
version of the system was produced in conjunction with
Fuji Xerox was a joint venture partnership between the Japanese photographic firm Fujifilm Holdings and the American document management company Xerox to develop, produce and sell xerographic and document-related products and services in the Asia-Pacifi ...
, code named ''J-Star'', and full support for international customers. In the end, many features from the Star Functional Specification were not implemented. The product had to get to market, and the last several months before release focused on reliability and performance.


System features


User interface

The key philosophy of the user interface was to mimic the office paradigm as much as possible in order to make it intuitive for users. The concept of ''what you see is what you get'' (
WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, is a system in which editing software allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed d ...
) was considered paramount. Text would be displayed as black on a white background, just like paper, and the printer would replicate the screen using Interpress, a page description language developed at PARC. One of the main designers of the Star, Dr.
David Canfield Smith David Canfield Smith is an American computer scientist best known for inventing computer icons and the programming technique known as programming by demonstration. His primary emphasis has been in the area of human–computer interaction (CHI) de ...
, invented the concept of
computer icon In computing, an icon is a pictogram or ideogram displayed on a computer screen in order to help the user navigate a computer system. The icon itself is a quickly comprehensible symbol of a software tool, function, or a data file, accessible on th ...
s and the desktop metaphor, in which the user would see a desktop that contained documents and folders, with different icons representing different types of documents.Salha, Nader
"Aesthetics and Art in the Early Development of Human-Computer Interfaces"
October 2012.
Smith, David

1975.
Clicking any icon would open a window. Users would not start programs first (e.g., a text editor, graphics program or spreadsheet software), they would simply open the file and the appropriate application would appear. The Star user interface was based on the concept of objects. For example, a word processing document would hold page objects, paragraph objects, sentence objects, word objects, and character objects. The user could select objects by clicking on them with the mouse, and press dedicated special keys on the keyboard to invoke standard object functions (open, delete, copy, move) in a uniform way. There was also a "Show Properties" key used to display settings, called property sheets, for the particular object (e.g., font size for a character object). These general conventions greatly simplified the menu structure of all the programs. Object integration was designed into the system from the start. For example, a chart object created in the graphing module could be inserted into any type of document. This type of ability eventually became available as part of the
operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...
on the
Apple Lisa Lisa is a desktop computer developed by Apple, released on January 19, 1983. It is one of the first personal computers to present a graphical user interface (GUI) in a machine aimed at individual business users. Its development began in 1978. ...
and was featured in Mac OS
System 7 System 7, codenamed "Big Bang", and also known as Mac OS 7, is a graphical user interface-based operating system for Macintosh computers and is part of the classic Mac OS series of operating systems. It was introduced on May 13, 1991, by Apple Co ...
as Publish and Subscribe. It became available on
Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
with the introduction of
Object Linking and Embedding Object Linking & Embedding (OLE) is a proprietary technology developed by Microsoft that allows embedding and linking to documents and other objects. For developers, it brought OLE Control Extension (OCX), a way to develop and use custom user i ...
(OLE) in 1990. This approach was also later used on the
OpenDoc OpenDoc is a defunct multi-platform software componentry framework standard created by Apple in the 1990s for compound documents, intended as an alternative to Microsoft's proprietary Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). It is one of Apple's ear ...
software platform in the mid-to-late 1990s, and in the
AppleWorks AppleWorks was an integrated office suite containing a word processor, database, and spreadsheet. It was developed by Rupert Lissner for Apple Computer, originally for the Apple II platform and launched in 1984, and was later reworked for the Ma ...
(originally ClarisWorks) package available for the Apple Mac (1991) and Microsoft Windows (1993).


Hardware

Initially, the Star software was to run on a new series of virtual-memory processors, described in a PARC technical report called, "''Wildflower: An Architecture for a Personal Computer''", by
Butler Lampson Butler W. Lampson, ForMemRS, (born December 23, 1943) is an American computer scientist best known for his contributions to the development and implementation of distributed personal computing. Education and early life After graduating from the ...
. The D* (pronounced D-Star) series of machines had names that began with the letter ''D''. They were all microprogrammed processors; for the Star software, microcode was loaded that implemented an instruction set designed for Mesa. It was possible to load microcode for the Interlisp or Smalltalk environments, but these 3 environments could not run at the same time. The Dolphin (aka D0), built with transistor-transistor logic (TTL) technology, included
74S181 The 74181 is a 4-bit slice arithmetic logic unit (ALU), implemented as a 7400 series TTL integrated circuit. The first complete ALU on a single chip, it was used as the arithmetic/logic core in the CPUs of many historically significant minicompu ...
ALUs. It was intended to be the Star workstation, but its cost was deemed too much to meet the project goals. The complexity of the software eventually overwhelmed its limited configuration. At one time in Star's development, it took more than half an hour to reboot the system. The next generation of these machines, the Dorado (aka D1), used an
emitter coupled logic In electronics, emitter-coupled logic (ECL) is a high-speed integrated circuit bipolar transistor logic family. ECL uses an overdriven bipolar junction transistor (BJT) differential amplifier with single-ended input and limited emitter current to ...
(ECL) processor. It was four times faster than Dandelion on standard benchmarks, and thus competitive with the fastest super minicomputers of the day. It was used for research but was a rack-mounted CPU that was never intended to be an office product. A
network router A router is a networking device that forwards data packets between computer networks. Routers perform the traffic directing functions between networks and on the global Internet. Data sent through a network, such as a web page or email, is ...
called Dicentra was also based on this design. The actually released Star workstation hardware was known as a Dandelion (often shortened to "Dlion"). It was based on the
AMD Am2900 Am2900 is a family of integrated circuits (ICs) created in 1975 by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). They were constructed with bipolar devices, in a bit-slice topology, and were designed to be used as modular components each representing a different ...
bitslice microprocessor technology. An enhanced version of the Dandelion, with more microcode space, was dubbed the "Dandetiger". The base Dandelion system had 384  KB
memory Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembered, ...
(expandable to 1.5 MB), a 10 MB, 29 MB or 40 MB 8" hard drive, an 8"
floppy drive A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined w ...
, mouse and an
Ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...
connection. The performance of this machine, which sold for $20,000, was about 850 in the
Dhrystone Dhrystone is a synthetic computing benchmark program developed in 1984 by Reinhold P. Weicker intended to be representative of system (integer) programming. The Dhrystone grew to become representative of general processor ( CPU) performance. T ...
benchmark — comparable to that of a
VAX-11 The VAX-11 is a discontinued family of 32-bit superminicomputers, running the Virtual Address eXtension (VAX) instruction set architecture (ISA), developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Development began in 1976. In a ...
/750, which cost five times more. The
cathode ray tube A cathode-ray tube (CRT) is a vacuum tube containing one or more electron guns, which emit electron beams that are manipulated to display images on a phosphorescent screen. The images may represent electrical waveforms ( oscilloscope), pictu ...
(CRT) display (black and white, 1024×808 pixels with 38.7 Hz refresh) was large by the time's standards. It was meant to be able to display two 8.5×11 in pages side by side in true size. An interesting feature of the display was that the overscan area (borders) could be programmed with a 16×16 repeating pattern. This was used to extend the root window pattern to all the edges of the monitor, a feature that is unavailable even today on most video cards. The D-Star machines were commercialized as: * Xerox 1100 Scientific Information Processor, ''Dolphin'' (1979) * Xerox 1132, ''Dorado'' * Xerox 1108, ''Dandelion'' (1981) * Xerox 1109, ''Dandetiger'' * Xerox 1186/6085, ''Daybreak''


Marketing and commercial reception

The Xerox Star was not originally meant to be a stand-alone computer, but to be part of an integrated Xerox "personal office system" that also connected to other workstations and network services via Ethernet. Although a single unit sold for , a typical office would need to buy at least 2 or 3 machines along with a file server and a name server/print server. Spending for a complete installation was not an easy sell, when a secretary's annual salary was about and a
VIC-20 The VIC-20 (known as the VC-20 in Germany and the VIC-1001 in Japan) is an 8-bit home computer that was sold by Commodore Business Machines. The VIC-20 was announced in 1980, roughly three years after Commodore's first personal computer, the PE ...
cost around . Later incarnations of the Star would allow users to buy one unit with a
laser printer Laser printing is an electrostatic digital printing process. It produces high-quality text and graphics (and moderate-quality photographs) by repeatedly passing a laser beam back and forth over a negatively-charged cylinder called a "drum" to d ...
, but even so, only about 25,000 units were sold, leading many to consider the Xerox Star a commercial failure. The workstation was originally designed to run the Star software for performing office tasks, but it was also sold with different software for other markets. These other configurations included a workstation for
Interlisp Interlisp (also seen with a variety of capitalizations) is a programming environment built around a version of the programming language Lisp. Interlisp development began in 1966 at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (renamed BBN Technologies) in Cambridge, ...
or Smalltalk, and a server. Some have said that the Star was ahead of its time, that few outside of a small circle of developers really understood the potential of the system, considering that IBM introduced their 8088-based
IBM PC The IBM Personal Computer (model 5150, commonly known as the IBM PC) is the first microcomputer released in the IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible de facto standard. Released on August 12, 1981, it was created by a team ...
running the comparatively primitive
PC DOS PC or pc may refer to: Arts and entertainment * Player character or playable character, a fictional character controlled by a human player, usually in role-playing games or computer games * ''Port Charles'', an American daytime TV soap opera * ...
the same year that the Star was brought to market. However, comparison with the IBM PC may be irrelevant: well before it was introduced, buyers in the Word Processing industry were aware of the 8086-based
IBM Displaywriter The IBM 6580 Displaywriter System is a 16-bit microcomputer that was marketed and sold by IBM's Office Products Division primarily as a word processor. Announced in June 1980 and effectively withdrawn from marketing in July 1986, the system was s ...
, the full-page portrait black-on-white Xerox 860 page display system and the 120 page-per-minute
Xerox 9700 The Xerox 9700 was a high-end laser printer manufactured by Xerox Corporation beginning in 1977. Based on the Xerox 9200 copier, the 9700 printed at 300 dots-per-inch on cut-sheet paper at up to two pages per second (pps), one- or two-sided, that i ...
laser printer. Furthermore, the design principles of Smalltalk and modeless working had been extensively discussed in the August 1981 issue of
Byte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...
magazine, so
Xerox PARC PARC (Palo Alto Research Center; formerly Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, the company was originally a division of Xero ...
's standing and the potential of the Star can scarcely have been lost on its target (office systems) market, who would never have expected IBM to position a mass-market PC to threaten far more profitable dedicated WP systems. Unfortunately, the influential niche market of pioneering players in
electronic publishing Electronic publishing (also referred to as publishing, digital publishing, or online publishing) includes the digital publication of e-books, Online magazine, digital magazines, and the development of digital library, digital libraries and catalo ...
such as
Longman Longman, also known as Pearson Longman, is a publishing company founded in London, England, in 1724 and is owned by Pearson PLC. Since 1968, Longman has been used primarily as an imprint by Pearson's Schools business. The Longman brand is also ...
were already aligning their production processes towards generic
markup language Markup language refers to a text-encoding system consisting of a set of symbols inserted in a text document to control its structure, formatting, or the relationship between its parts. Markup is often used to control the display of the document ...
s such as
SGML The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML; ISO 8879:1986) is a standard for defining generalized markup languages for documents. ISO 8879 Annex A.1 states that generalized markup is "based on two postulates": * Declarative: Markup should des ...
(forerunner of HTML and XML) whereby authors using inexpensive offline systems could describe document structure, making their manuscripts ready for transfer to
computer to film Computer to film (CTF) is a print workflow involving printing from a computer straight to film through an imagesetter. Designs are typically created in Adobe Illustrator or CorelDRAW, however they can also be produced in AutoCAD, Inkscape and ma ...
systems that offered far higher resolution than the then maximum of 360 dpi laser printing technologies. Another possible reason given for the lack of success of the Star was Xerox's corporate structure. A longtime
copier A photocopier (also called copier or copy machine, and formerly Xerox machine, the generic trademark) is a machine that makes copies of documents and other visual images onto paper or plastic film quickly and cheaply. Most modern photocopiers u ...
company, Xerox played to their strengths. They already had one significant failure in making their acquisition of
Scientific Data Systems Scientific Data Systems (SDS), was an American computer company founded in September 1961 by Max Palevsky and Robert Beck, veterans of Packard Bell Corporation and Bendix, along with eleven other computer scientists. SDS was an early adopter of i ...
pay off. It is said that there were internal jealousies between the old line copier systems divisions that were responsible for bulk of Xerox's revenues and the new upstart division. Their marketing efforts were seen by some as half-hearted or unfocused. Furthermore, the most technically savvy sales representatives that might have sold office automation equipment were paid large commissions on leases of laser printer equipment costing up to a half-million dollars. No commission structure for ''decentralized'' systems could compete. The multi-lingual technical documentation market was also a major opportunity, but this needed cross-border collaboration for which few sales organisations were ready at the time. Even within Xerox Corporation, in the mid-1980s, there was little understanding of the system. Few corporate executives ever saw or used the system, and the sales teams, if they requested a ''computer'' to assist with their planning, would instead receive older,
CP/M CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/ 85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. Initial ...
-based
Xerox 820 The Xerox 820 Information Processor is an 8-bit desktop computer sold by Xerox in the early 1980s. The computer runs under the CP/M operating system and uses floppy disk drives for mass storage. The microprocessor board is a licensed variant of ...
or 820-II systems. There was no effort to seed the 8010/8012 Star systems within Xerox Corporation. Probably most significantly, strategic planners at the Xerox Systems Group (XSG) felt that they could not compete against other workstation makers such as
Apollo Computer Apollo Computer Inc., founded in 1980 in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, by William Poduska (a founder of Prime Computer) and others, developed and produced Apollo/Domain workstations in the 1980s. Along with Symbolics and Sun Microsystems, Apollo wa ...
or
Symbolics Symbolics was a computer manufacturer Symbolics, Inc., and a privately held company that acquired the assets of the former company and continues to sell and maintain the Open Genera Lisp system and the Macsyma computer algebra system.
. The Xerox name alone was considered their greatest asset, but it did not produce customers. Finally, by today's standards, the system would be considered very slow, due partly to the limited hardware of the time, and partly to a poorly implemented file system; saving a large file could take minutes. Crashes could be followed by an hours-long process called ''file scavenging'', signaled by the appearance of the diagnostic code ''7511'' in the top left corner of the screen. In the end, the Star's weak commercial reception probably came down to price, performance in demonstrations, and weakness of sales channels. Even then Apple Computer's
Lisa Lisa or LISA may refer to: People People with the mononym * Lisa Lisa (born 1967), American actress and lead singer of the Cult Jam * Lisa (Japanese musician, born 1974), stylized "LISA", Japanese singer and producer * Lisa Komine (born 1978), J ...
, inspired by the Star and introduced 2 years later, was a market failure, for many of the same reasons as the Star. To credit Xerox, they did try many things to try to improve sales. The next release of Star was on a different, more efficient hardware platform, Daybreak, using a new, faster processor, and accompanied by significant rewriting of the Star software, renamed ViewPoint, to improve performance. The new system, dubbed the ''Xerox 6085 PCS'', was released in 1985. The new hardware provided 1 MB to 4 MB of memory, a 10 MB to 80 MB hard disk, a 15" or 19" display, a 5.25" floppy drive, a mouse, Ethernet connection and a price of a little over . The Xerox 6085 could be sold along with an attached laser printer as a standalone system. Also offered was a PC compatibility mode via an 80186-based expansion board. Users could transfer files between the ViewPoint system and PC-based software, albeit with some difficulty because the file formats were incompatible with any on the PC. But even with a significantly lower price, it was still a
Rolls-Royce Rolls-Royce (always hyphenated) may refer to: * Rolls-Royce Limited, a British manufacturer of cars and later aero engines, founded in 1906, now defunct Automobiles * Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, the current car manufacturing company incorporated in ...
in the world of lower cost personal computers. In 1989, Viewpoint 2.0 introduced many new applications related to
desktop publishing Desktop publishing (DTP) is the creation of documents using page layout software on a personal ("desktop") computer. It was first used almost exclusively for print publications, but now it also assists in the creation of various forms of online c ...
. Eventually, Xerox jettisoned the integrated hardware/software workstation offered by Viewpoint and offered a software-only product called ''
GlobalView GlobalView was an integrated “desktop environment” including word-processing, desktop-publishing, and simple calculation (spreadsheet) and database functionality. It was developed at Xerox Parc as a way to run the software originally developed f ...
'', providing the Star interface and technology on an IBM PC compatible platform. The initial release required installing a Mesa CPU add-on board. The final release of GlobalView 2.1 ran as an emulator on Sun Solaris, Microsoft
Windows 3.1 Windows 3.1 is a major release of Microsoft Windows. It was released to manufacturing on April 6, 1992, as a successor to Windows 3.0. Like its predecessors, the Windows 3.1 series ran as a shell on top of MS-DOS. Codenamed Janus, Windows 3 ...
,
Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturin ...
, or
Windows 98 Windows 98 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. The second operating system in the 9x line, it is the successor to Windows 95, and was released to ...
, IBM
OS/2 OS/2 (Operating System/2) is a series of computer operating systems, initially created by Microsoft and IBM under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci. As a result of a feud between the two companies over how to position OS/2 ...
and was released in 1996. In the end, Xerox PARC, which prided itself upon building hardware 10 years ahead of its time and equipping each researcher with the hardware so they could get started on the software, enabled Xerox to bring the product to market 5 years too early, all throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s. The custom-hardware platform was always too expensive for the mission for which Star/Viewpoint was intended. Apple, having copied the Xerox Star in the early 1980s with Lisa, struggled and had the same poor results. Apple's second, cost-reduced effort, the Macintosh, barely succeeded (by ditching the virtual memory, implementing it in software, and using commodity microprocessors) - and was not their most profitable product in the late 1980s. Apple also struggled to make profits on office system software in the same time period.
L Peter Deutsch L Peter Deutsch (born Laurence Peter Deutsch on August 7, 1946, in Boston, Massachusetts) is the founder of Aladdin Enterprises and creator of Ghostscript, a free software PostScript and Portable Document Format, PDF interpreter. Deutsch's othe ...
, one of the pioneers of the Postscript language, finally found a way to achieve Xerox-Star-like efficiency using
just-in-time compilation In computing, just-in-time (JIT) compilation (also dynamic translation or run-time compilations) is a way of executing computer code that involves compilation during execution of a program (at run time) rather than before execution. This may cons ...
in the early 1990s for bitmap operations, making the last bit of Xerox-Star custom hardware, the
BitBLT Bit blit (also written BITBLT, BIT BLT, BitBLT, Bit BLT, Bit Blt etc., which stands for ''bit block transfer'') is a data operation commonly used in computer graphics in which several bitmaps are combined into one using a ''boolean function''. The ...
, obsolete by 1990.


Legacy

Even though the Star product failed in the market, it raised expectations and laid important groundwork for later computers. Many of the innovations behind the Star, such as WYSIWYG editing,
Ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...
, and network services such as directory, print, file, and internetwork routing have become commonplace in computers of today. Members of the
Apple Lisa Lisa is a desktop computer developed by Apple, released on January 19, 1983. It is one of the first personal computers to present a graphical user interface (GUI) in a machine aimed at individual business users. Its development began in 1978. ...
engineering team saw Star at its introduction at the
National Computer Conference The Joint Computer Conferences were a series of computer conferences in the United States held under various names between 1951 and 1987. The conferences were the venue for presentations and papers representing "cumulative work in the omputerfield ...
(NCC '81) and returned to Cupertino where they converted their desktop manager to an icon-based interface modeled on the Star. Among the developers of Xerox's
Gypsy The Romani (also spelled Romany or Rromani , ), colloquially known as the Roma, are an Indo-Aryan ethnic group, traditionally nomadic itinerants. They live in Europe and Anatolia, and have diaspora populations located worldwide, with sign ...
WYSIWYG editor,
Larry Tesler Lawrence Gordon Tesler (April 24, 1945 – February 16, 2020) was an American computer scientist who worked in the field of human–computer interaction. Tesler worked at Xerox PARC, Apple, Amazon, and Yahoo! While at PARC, Tesler's work include ...
left Xerox to join Apple in 1980 where he also developed the MacApp framework.
Charles Simonyi Charles Simonyi (; hu, Simonyi Károly, ; born September 10, 1948) is a Hungarian-American software architect. He started and led Microsoft's applications group, where he built the first versions of Microsoft Office. He co-founded and led In ...
left Xerox to join
Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...
in 1981 where he developed first WYSIWYG version of Microsoft Word (3.0). In 1983, Simonyi recommended
Scott A. McGregor Scott A. McGregor (born 1956) is an American technology executive and philanthropist. He was the lead developer of Windows 1.0 (the first release of Microsoft Windows), he was the CEO of Philips Semiconductors from 2001to2004, and was the CEO ...
, who was recruited by Bill Gates to lead the development of
Windows 1.0 Windows 1.0 is the first major release of Microsoft Windows, a family of graphical operating systems for personal computers developed by Microsoft. It was first released to manufacturing in the United States on November 20, 1985, while the Euro ...
, in part for McGregor's experience in windowing systems at PARC. Later that year, several others left PARC to join Microsoft. Star, Viewpoint and
GlobalView GlobalView was an integrated “desktop environment” including word-processing, desktop-publishing, and simple calculation (spreadsheet) and database functionality. It was developed at Xerox Parc as a way to run the software originally developed f ...
were the first commercial computing environments to offer support for most
natural language In neuropsychology, linguistics, and philosophy of language, a natural language or ordinary language is any language that has evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation. Natural languages ...
s, including full-featured word processing, leading to their adoption by the
Voice of America Voice of America (VOA or VoA) is the state-owned news network and international radio broadcaster of the United States of America. It is the largest and oldest U.S.-funded international broadcaster. VOA produces digital, TV, and radio content ...
, other United States foreign affairs agencies, and several multinational corporations. The list of products that were inspired or influenced by the user interface of the Star, and to a lesser extent the Alto, include the
Apple Lisa Lisa is a desktop computer developed by Apple, released on January 19, 1983. It is one of the first personal computers to present a graphical user interface (GUI) in a machine aimed at individual business users. Its development began in 1978. ...
and
Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...
,
Graphics Environment Manager GEM (for Graphics Environment Manager) is an operating environment released by Digital Research (DRI) in 1985 for use with the DOS operating system on Intel 8088 and Motorola 68000 microprocessors. GEM is known primarily as the graphical user ...
(GEM) from
Digital Research Digital Research, Inc. (DR or DRI) was a company created by Gary Kildall to market and develop his CP/M operating system and related 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit systems like MP/M, Concurrent DOS, FlexOS, Multiuser DOS, DOS Plus, DR DOS and ...
(the
CP/M CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/ 85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. Initial ...
company), VisiCorp's
Visi On VisiCorp Visi On was a short-lived but influential graphical user interface-based operating environment program for IBM compatible personal computers running MS-DOS. Although Visi On was never popular, as it had steep minimum system requirements ...
,
Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
,
Atari ST The Atari ST is a line of personal computers from Atari Corporation and the successor to the Atari 8-bit family. The initial model, the Atari 520ST, had limited release in April–June 1985 and was widely available in July. It was the first pers ...
,
BTRON BTRON (Business TRON) is one of the subprojects of the TRON Project proposed by Ken Sakamura, which is responsible for the business phase. It refers to the operating systems (OS), keyboards, peripheral interface specifications, and other items re ...
from
TRON Project TRON (acronym for The Real-time Operating system Nucleus) is an open architecture real-time operating system kernel design. The project was started by Professor Dr. Ken Sakamura of the University of Tokyo in 1984. The project's goal is to create ...
, Commodore's
Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphi ...
, Elixir Desktop,
Metaphor Computer Systems Metaphor Computer Systems (1982–1994) was an American computer company that created an advanced workstation, database gateway, unique graphical office interface, and software applications that "seamlessly integrate" data from both internal and ...
,
Interleaf Interleaf, Inc., was a company that created computer software products for the technical publishing creation and distribution process. Founded in 1981, its initial product was the first commercial document processor that integrated text and graphi ...
, IBM
OS/2 OS/2 (Operating System/2) is a series of computer operating systems, initially created by Microsoft and IBM under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci. As a result of a feud between the two companies over how to position OS/2 ...
,
OPEN LOOK OPEN LOOK (sometimes referred to as Open Look) is a graphical user interface (GUI) specification for UNIX workstations. It was originally defined in the late 1980s by Sun Microsystems and AT&T Corporation. History OPEN LOOK was created at a ...
(co-developed by Xerox),
SunView SunView (Sun Visual Integrated Environment for Workstations, originally SunTools) is a discontinued windowing system from Sun Microsystems developed in the early 1980s. It was included as part of SunOS, Sun's UNIX implementation; unlike later U ...
,
KDE KDE is an international Free software movement, free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that allow collaborative work on this kind of software. Well-know ...
,
Ventura Publisher Ventura (Italian language, Italian, Portuguese language, Portuguese and Spanish language, Spanish for "fortune") may refer to: Places ; Brazil * Boa Ventura de São Roque, a municipality in the state of Paraná, southern Brazil * Boa Ventura, ...
and
NEXTSTEP NeXTSTEP is a discontinued object-oriented, multitasking operating system based on the Mach kernel and the UNIX-derived BSD. It was developed by NeXT Computer in the late 1980s and early 1990s and was initially used for its range of proprieta ...
.
Adobe Systems Adobe Inc. ( ), originally called Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American multinational computer software company incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in San Jose, California. It has historically specialized in software for the crea ...
PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Br ...
was based on Interpress.
Ethernet Ethernet () is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...
was further refined by
3Com 3Com Corporation was an American digital electronics manufacturer best known for its computer network products. The company was co-founded in 1979 by Robert Metcalfe, Howard Charney and others. Bill Krause joined as President in 1981. Metcalfe ex ...
, and has become a
de facto ''De facto'' ( ; , "in fact") describes practices that exist in reality, whether or not they are officially recognized by laws or other formal norms. It is commonly used to refer to what happens in practice, in contrast with ''de jure'' ("by la ...
standard networking protocol. Some people feel that Apple, Microsoft, and others plagiarized the
GUI The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...
and other innovations from the Xerox Star, and believe that Xerox didn't properly protect its intellectual property. The truth is more complex, perhaps. Many patent disclosures were submitted for the innovations in the Star. However, at the time, the 1975 Xerox Consent Decree, a
Federal Trade Commission The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is an independent agency of the United States government whose principal mission is the enforcement of civil (non-criminal) antitrust law and the promotion of consumer protection. The FTC shares jurisdiction ov ...
(FTC)
antitrust Competition law is the field of law that promotes or seeks to maintain market competition by regulating anti-competitive conduct by companies. Competition law is implemented through public and private enforcement. It is also known as antitrust l ...
action, placed restrictions on what the firm was able to
patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A p ...
. Also, when the Star disclosures were being prepared, the Xerox patent attorneys were busy with several other new technologies such as laser printing. Finally, patents on software, particularly those relating to user interfaces, were then an untested legal area. Xerox did go to trial to protect the Star user interface. In 1989, after Apple sued Microsoft for copyright infringement of its Macintosh user interface in Windows, Xerox filed a similar
lawsuit - A lawsuit is a proceeding by a party or parties against another in the civil court of law. The archaic term "suit in law" is found in only a small number of laws still in effect today. The term "lawsuit" is used in reference to a civil actio ...
against Apple. However, this suit was thrown out on procedural grounds, not substantive, because a three-year
statute of limitations A statute of limitations, known in civil law systems as a prescriptive period, is a law passed by a legislative body to set the maximum time after an event within which legal proceedings may be initiated. ("Time for commencing proceedings") In m ...
had passed. In 1994, Apple lost its suit against Microsoft, not only the issues originally contested, but all claims to the user interface. On January 15, 2019, a work-in-progress Xerox Star emulator created by LCM+L known as Darkstar was released for Windows and Linux.


See also

*
Lisp machine Lisp machines are general-purpose computers designed to efficiently run Lisp as their main software and programming language, usually via hardware support. They are an example of a high-level language computer architecture, and in a sense, the ...
*
Pilot (operating system) Pilot is a single-user, multitasking operating system designed by Xerox PARC in early 1977. Pilot was written in the Mesa programming language, totalling about 24,000 lines of code. Overview Pilot was designed as a single user system in a highl ...


References


External links


The first GUIs - Chapter 2. History: A Brief History of User Interfaces

Star graphics: An object-oriented implementation

Traits: An approach to multiple-inheritance subclassing

The design of Star's records processing: data processing for the noncomputer professional



The Xerox "Star": A Retrospective.
with full-size screenshots)

* ttps://www.digibarn.com/friends/alanfreier/index.html Alan O Freier on the "D*" Machines, the Dolphin, Dorado, Dandelion and more
The Digibarn's pages on the Xerox Star 8010 Information System



HCI Review of the Xerox Star


* Video
Xerox Star User Interface (1982)
* Video
Xerox Star User Interface compared to Apple Lisa (2020)
{{Xerox
Star A star is an astronomical object comprising a luminous spheroid of plasma (physics), plasma held together by its gravity. The List of nearest stars and brown dwarfs, nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked ...
History of human–computer interaction Computer workstations Products introduced in 1981 Computers using bit-slice designs