The Xerox

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The Xerox Star

• A Retrospective

By Bruno Nadeau Luv Sharma
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Overview

• What is the Star
• Features What Makes it Unique
• History of Star Development
• Xerox PARC
• Lessons Learned

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• Although Star was conceived as a product in 1975
  and released in 1981, the history of its
  development dates back three decades.

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Memex(1945)

• Vannevar Bush describes his vision of a personal,
  desktop computer.
• This was when computers were new, room-sized and
  used in military applications.
• The idea languishes because of insufficient
  technology and imagination.

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Memex(1945)

• Vannevar Bush describes his vision of a personal,
  desktop computer.
• This was when computers were new, room-sized and
  used in military applications.
• The idea languishes because of insufficient
  technology and imagination.

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Sketchpad(1960s)

• Ivan Sutherland builds an interactive graphics
  system that allows a user to create graphical
  figures on a CRT display using a light pen.
• These figures were treated as objects and could
  be moved, copied, shrunk, expanded, rotated etc.
• Sketchpad heavily influenced Stars user
  interface and graphic applications.

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Sketchpad(1960s)

• Ivan Sutherland builds an interactive graphics
  system that allows a user to create graphical
  figures on a CRT display using a light pen.
• These figures were treated as objects and could
  be moved, copied, shrunk, expanded, rotated etc.
• Sketchpad heavily influenced Stars user
  interface.

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NLS(1960s)

• Douglas Engelbart establishes a research program
  at Stanford Research Institute(SRI).
• Experiments with different types of displays and
  input devices.
• Invents the mouse.
• Develops a system commonly called NLS.

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NLS(1960s)

• NLS was different
• It used CRT displays and not teletypes.
• It was interactive(online) when almost all
  computing was batch.
• Full-screen oriented when other interactive
  systems were line-oriented.
• It had a Mouse!
• First system to organize information in trees and
  networks.

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The Reactive Engine(1969)

• Alan Kay, a graduate student at the time, in his
  dissertation, developed many ideas that found
  their way into Star.
• Later, he brought to fruition these ideas in the
  Smalltalk programming language.
• Like the developers of NLS, he realized
  interactive applications do not have to treat
  the display as a glass teletype and can share the
  screen with other programs

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Xerox PARC(1970)

• Palo Alto Research Center - several laboratories
  devoted to basic and applied research in
  materials science, laser physics, integrated
  circuitry, CAD, user interfaces etc.
• Researchers at PARC were fond of the slogan - the
  best way to predict the future is to invent it.
  So they began searching for a new approach to
  computing.

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Xerox PARC(1970)

• Among the founding members of PARC was Alan Kay,
  who liked the novel approach to HCI followed by
  NLS.
• As a result, PARC hired several people who had
  worked on NLS.
• In 1971, PARC signed agreement with SRI licensing
  Xerox to use the mouse.
• One major outcome of this new approach was the
  Alto.

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Alto(1972)

• Mini-computer with removable 2.5 mb hard disk
  pack.
• 128-256 kb memory.
• Microprogrammable instruction set.
• Full-page bitmapped graphic display.
• 50 kb of high-speed display memory.
• A mouse.

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Ethernet

• Standardized layered communication protocols.
• Used to network the newly built Alto computers.

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Smalltalk

• Language and programming environment.
• Refined and solidified concepts of
  object-oriented programming.
• Most importantly for Star, Smalltalk demonstrated
  power of
• Graphical, bitmapped displays
• Mouse-driven input
• Windows and
• Simultaneous applications.

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Pygmalion

• Doctoral thesis project of David C. Smith.
• Demonstrated
• programming is not necessarily textual it can be
  done by interacting with graphical elements on
  screen
• computers can be programmed in the language of
  the user interface
• the idea of using icons for direct manipulation.

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Bravo, Gypsy and BravoX

• Charles Simolyn and Butler Lampson write advanced
  document editing system called Bravo(1976-78).WYS
  IWYG
• Exemplifying modelessness, Larry Tesler writes
  another text-editor Gypsy.
• Simonyl and others add style and users ability
  to control the appearance of their documents
  BravoX.

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Draw, Sil, Markup, Flyer and Doodle

• Draw and Sil Graphical object editors that
  allowed users to construct figures out of
  selectable, movable, stretchable geometric forms
  and text.
• Markup Bitmap graphics editor(like paint).
• Flyer Another paint program written in Smalltalk
  for Alto.
• Doodle The above inspired Doodle for a later
  machine, eventually evolving into Viewpoints
  Free-Hand Drawing application.

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Laser Printing

• Invented at PARC.
• Press page-description language developed
  (uniform way to describe output to printers).
• Press -gt Interpress (Xeroxs commercial
  page-description language) -gt Postscript(Adobes
  page-description language).

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Laurel and Hardy

• Though e-mail was not invented at PARC, it was
  made more accessible to non-engineers through
  Laurel(display-oriented tool for sending,
  receiving and organizing e-mail).
• Laurel inspires Hardy for a successor of Alto.

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Officetalk

• Prototype office automation system.
• Supported standard office automation tasks.
• Tracked jobs that went from person to person in
  an organization.

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Star(1981)

• Contrary to popular belief, Star was not
  developed at PARC.
• Separate organization called System Development
  Department(split between southern, El Segundo and
  northern California, Palo Alto).
• SDD used Mesa, a dialect of Pascal as the
  primary product programming language.

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Star-Hardware

• 8000 series network system processor
• 384 kb of real memory
• A local harddisk - 10,20 or 40 mb
• 17 inch display
• Mechanical mouse
• 8 inch floppy disk drive
• Ethernet connection.
• 16,000 only!

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Star-Software

• Mammoth task to integrate all the software
  described above into one coherent design.
• About 30 person-years went into the design of the
  interface, functionality and hardware.
• Objects and actions objects that users can
  manipulate and actions that software provided for
  this manipulation.

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Star(1981)

• Since the SDD was split in two locations, it had
  to come up with an effective means of
  communication.
• Ethernet 56kbps lease line.
• Design and Prototyping - Palo Alto
• Implementation - El Segundo.

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Tajo/XDE

• Since the machine was developed in parallel with
  the software, it was not available initially as a
  development platform.
• So early prototyping and development done on
  Altos.
• When the 8000 series workstations were available,
  the systems group developed XDE, known internally
  as Tajo.

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Success?

• In spite of such exemplary vision, Star is
  considered a commercial failure. So why did Star
  fail?
• Too expensive at 16,000?
• Ahead of its time?
• Not marketed well?
• Too monolithic?

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Lessons from experience

• Pay attention to industry trends
• Pay attention to what customers want
• Know your competition
• Establish firm performance goals
• Avoid geographically spilt organizations
• Dont be dogmatic about Desktop metaphor and
  direct manipulation

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What was right

• Iconic, direct manipulation, object-oriented user
  interface
• Generic commands and consistency
• Pointing device
• High resolution display
• Good graphic design
• 16-bit character set
• Distributed personal computing

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