The Xerox Star: a retrospective

Abstract

The Xerox Star has had a significant impact upon the computer industry. In this retrospective, several of Star's designers describe how Star was and is unique, its historical antecedents, how it was designed and developed, how it has evolved since its introduction, and, finally, some lessons learned. What Star Is Star was designed as an office automation system. The idea was that professionals in a business or organization would have workstations on their desks and would use them to produce, retrieve, distribute, and organize documentation, presentations, memos, and reports. All of the workstations in an organization would be connected via Ethernet and would share access to file servers, printers, etc. Star's designers assumed that the target users are interested in getting their work done and not at all interested in computers. Therefore, an important design goal was to make the "computer" as invisible to users as possible. The applications included in the system were those that office professionals would supposedly need: documents, business graphics, tables, personal database , and electronic mail. The set was fixed, always loaded, and automatically associated with data files, eliminating the need for users to worry about obtaining, installing, and starting the right application for a given task or data file. Users could focus on their work, oblivious of concepts like software, operating systems, applications, and programs. Another important assumption was that Star's users would be casual, occasional users, rather than people who spent most of their time at the machine. This assumption led to the goal of having Star be easy to learn and remember. When Star was first introduced in 1981, its bitmapped screen, windows, mouse-driven interface, and icons were unique in the marketplace. They were readily-apparent features that clearly distinguished it from other computers. Soon, however, these features were adopted by others. Today, windows, mice, and icons are more common. However, Star's clean, consistent user interface has much more to do with its details than with its gross features. We list here the features that we think make Star what it is, categorized according to their level in the system architecture, the levels being: machine and network, window and file manager, user-interface, and document editor. Machine and Network Level Distributed, personal computing-Though ViewPoint is available in a stand-alone configuration, Star and ViewPoint were designed primarily to operate in a distributed computing environment. This approach combines the advantages and avoids the disadvantages of the two other primary approaches to interactive computing: time-shared systems and stand-alone personal computers. Time-shared systems, dominant through the Sixties and Seventies, allow expensive resources like printers and large data stores to be shared by many users and help assure the consistency of data that must be used by many. The disadvantages of timesharing are that all users are dependent upon the continued functioning o...

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