Xerox Compatible

The Star workstation, officially known as the 8010 Star Information System, was introduced by Xerox Corporation in 1981. more...

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It was the first commercial system to incorporate various technologies that today have become commonplace in personal computers, including a bitmapped display, a window-based graphical user interface, icons, folders, mouse, Ethernet networking, file servers, print servers and e-mail.

Background

The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), was founded by Xerox Corporation in 1970 to serve as an internal think tank to develop new technologies in the hope of producing marketable products.

The Alto

Various individuals or groups within PARC independently pursued different digital technologies. The culmination of this development was the Alto, a workstation developed for internal use at Xerox and also distributed on a limited basis to a few universities. The Alto had many advanced features including a bitmapped display, icons, a mouse used as a pointer and Ethernet networking.

As a commercial product, the Alto was lacking. Every program had its own interface and operating it required technical knowledge. The system was not considered to be user-friendly enough for less sophisticated users in an office environment. The most common programs were the Bravo word processor; Laurel, an e-mail program and its successor Hardy; Sil, a vector drawing program; and Markup, a bitmap editor (paint program). There was no spreadsheet or database software.

The Star

The Star was not developed by PARC. In 1977, under the direction of Don Massaro, the Systems Development Department (SDD) was established in El Segundo, California with some members culled from PARC in Palo Alto, California for "SDD North" – a team that eventually grew to more than 200 developers. They were tasked with designing a new system that incorporated the best features of the Alto, was easy to use and could automate many office tasks. The initiative was dubbed "The Office of the Future" and its development was headed by David Liddle.

The competitive landscape of the era was dominated by costly mainframes and minicomputers equipped with dumb terminals that time-shared processing time of the central computer. On the other side of the spectrum, personal computers were simplistic, with limited processing power and the inability to communicate with other systems. Xerox saw a niche somewhere in between with a distributed processing architecture – smart workstations with centralized file and peripheral sharing.

User Interface

A good part of a year was taken up by meetings and planning, the result of which was an extensive and detailed functional specification (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 rigorously maintained standards.

Read more at Wikipedia.org