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The Star workstation, officially known as the 8010 Star Information System, was introduced by Xerox Corporation in 1981. It was the first commercial system to incorporate various technologies that today have become commonplace in personal computers, including a bitmapped display, a windows-based graphical user interface, icons, folders, mouse, Ethernet networking, file servers, print servers and e-mail. A computer workstation, often colloquially referred to as workstation, is a high-end general-purpose microcomputer designed to be used by one person at a time and which offers higher performance than normally found in a personal computer, especially with respect to graphics, processing power and the ability to carry...
Xerox Corporation (NYSE: XRX) (pronounced ) is an American document management company, which manufactures and sells a range of color and black-and-white printers, multifunction systems, photo copiers, digital production printing presses, and related consulting services and supplies. ...
1981 (MCMLXXXI) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ...
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The Savior Not Made By Hands (1410s, by Andrei Rublev) An icon (from Greek εικων, eikon, image) is an artistic visual representation or symbol of anything considered holy and divine, such as God, saints or deities. ...
Operating a mechanical 1: Pulling the mouse turns the ball. ...
Ethernet is a large and diverse family of frame-based computer networking technologies for local area networks (LANs). ...
In telecommunication, the term file server has the following meanings: A form of disk storage that hosts files within a network. ...
A print serveris a host computer or device to which one or more printers are connected and which accepts print jobs from external client computers. ...
Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ...
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. Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was a flagship research division of the Xerox Corporation, based in Palo Alto, California, USA, which essentially created the modern personal computer paper paradigm. ...
Xerox Corporation (NYSE: XRX) is the worlds largest supplier of toner-based (dry ink) photocopier machines and associated supplies. ...
1970 (MCMLXX) was a common year starting on Thursday (the link is to a full 1970 calendar). ...
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. A Xerox Alto Computer System The Xerox Alto, developed at Xerox PARC in 1973, was the first personal computer and the first computer to use the desktop metaphor and graphical user interface (GUI). ...
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. SIL International is a non-profit, faith-based, scientific organization with the main purpose to study, develop and document lesser-known languages for the purpose of expanding linguistic knowledge, promoting world literacy and aiding minority language development. ...
To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...
A database is a collection of logically related data designed to meet the information needs of one or more users. ...
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. For the album by Ash, see 1977 (album). ...
El Segundo is a city located in Los Angeles County, California on the Santa Monica Bay. ...
Downtown Palo Alto Palo Alto is a city in Santa Clara County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, USA. Palo Alto is located at the northern end of the Silicon Valley, and is home to Stanford University (which is technically located in an adjacent area — Stanford, California...
David Liddle is co-founder of Interval Research Corporation, consulting professor of computer science at Stanford University, and credited with heading development of the groundbreaking Xerox Star computer system. ...
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. Mainframes (often colloquially referred to as big iron) are large and expensive computers used mainly by government institutions and large companies for legacy applications, typically bulk data processing (such as censuses, industry/consumer statistics, ERP, and bank transaction processing). ...
HP2114 minicomputer Minicomputer is a largely obsolete term for a class of multi-user computers which make up the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems (mainframe computers) and the smallest single-user systems (microcomputers or personal computers). ...
A dumb terminal in computing consists of a computer screen and keyboard, but practically no processing ability. ...
Alternate uses: see Timesharing Time-sharing is an approach to interactive computing in which a single computer is used to provide apparently simultaneous interactive general-purpose computing to multiple users by sharing processor time. ...
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.
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 WYSIWYG 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. WYSIWYG (pronounced //, transcripted wizziwig), is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, used in computing to describe a system in which content during editing appears very similar to the final product. ...
Interpress is a page description language developed at Xerox PARC, based on the Forth programming language. ...
The user would see a desktop that contained documents and folders, with different icons representing different types of documents. Clicking any icon would open a window. Users would not use programs (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 in a word processing document, there would be page objects, paragraph objects, sentence objects, word objects and character objects. Once a user clicked on an object, they could invoke a standard function from special keys on the keyboard, such as Open, Delete, Copy and Move. 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). This greatly simplified the menu structure 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 capability did not become available in Microsoft Windows until OLE (Object linking and embedding) was introduced in Windows nine years later in 1990. Microsoft Windows is a family of operating systems by Microsoft. ...
Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) is a distributed object system and protocol developed by Microsoft. ...
The Development Process One Palo Alto group worked on the underlying operating system interface to the hardware and programming tools; teams in El Segundo and Palo Alto collaborated on development of the user interface and user applications.
The staff relied heavily on the very technologies that they were working on -- file sharing, print servers and e-mail. They were even connected to the Internet, known as the Arpanet at that time, which allowed them to communicate between El Segundo and Palo Alto.
The Star was implemented in the Mesa programming language, a direct precursor to Modula-2 and Modula-3. Mesa was not object-oriented, but tools and programming techniques were developed which allowed pseudo object-oriented design and programming. Mesa required programmers to create two files for every module, a definition module which specified data structures and procedures for each object and one or more implementation module that has the actual code for the procedures. Mesa is a programming language developed at Xerox PARC that was used to program the Xerox Alto (one of the first personal computers with a graphical user interface), and later the Xerox Star workstations, and later the GlobalView desktop environment. ...
Modula-2 is a computer programming language invented by Niklaus Wirth at ETH around 1978, as a successor to Modula, another language by him. ...
Modula-3 is a now little-used programming language conceived as a successor to an upgraded version of Modula-2. ...
Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a computer programming paradigm in which a software system is modeled as a set of objects that interact with each other. ...
The Star team used a sophisticated integrated development environment known internally as Tajo and externally as Xerox Development Environment or XDE. Tajo had many similarities with the Smalltalk-80 environment, but it had many additional tools. For example, the DF version control system which required programmers to check out modules before they could be changed. Any change in a module which would force dependent modules to change were closely tracked and documented. Changes to lower level modules required various levels of approval. An integrated development environment (IDE), also known as integrated design environment and integrated debugging environment, is a type of computer software that assists computer programmers to develop software. ...
The Xerox Development Environment was one of the first Integrated Development Environments. ...
The software development process was intense. It involved a lot of prototyping and user testing. The software engineers had to develop new network protocols and data-encoding schemes when those used in PARC's research environment proved inadequate.
Initially, only Altos were available as development tools. 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, some based on results from user testing, some based on marketing considerations, and some based on systems considerations.
A Japanese language version of the system was produced in conjunction with Fuji Xerox (code named "J-Star") as well as full support for international customers. Fuji Xerox is a joint venture partnership between the Japanese photographic firm Fuji Photo Film Co. ...
In the end, there were many features from the Star Functional Specification that had to be left at the table. The product had to get to market and the last several months before release focused on reliability and performance.
Hardware Description Initially the Star software was developed on a hardware platform dubbed the Dolphin, however the complexity of the software eventually overwhelmed its limited configuration. At one point in Star's development, it would take more than one half hour to reboot the system.
The eventual Star workstation hardware was known as a Dandelion, or Dlion, based on the "Wildflower" architecture paper by Butler Lampson. Its microprogrammed, bit-sliced CPU ran a virtual machine for the Mesa programming language. Butler W. Lampson is a computer scientist, considered to be one of the most significant in the history of the field. ...
In general terms, a virtual machine in computer science is software that creates a virtualized environment between the computer platform and the end user in which the end user can operate software. ...
Mesa is a programming language developed at Xerox PARC that was used to program the Xerox Alto (one of the first personal computers with a graphical user interface), and later the Xerox Star workstations, and later the GlobalView desktop environment. ...
The system had 384KB memory (expandable to 1.5MB), a 10MB, 29MB or 40MB hard drive, an 8" floppy drive, mouse and an Ethernet connection. The 17" CRT display (black and white) was large by standards at the time. It was meant to be able to display two 8.5"x11" pages side by side in actual size. Ethernet is a large and diverse family of frame-based computer networking technologies for local area networks (LANs). ...
Marketing of the Star The Xerox Star was not originally meant to be a stand-alone computer, but was 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 $16,000, a typical office would have to purchase at least 2 or 3 machines along with a file server and a print server. Dropping $50,000 to $100,000 for a complete installation was not an easy sell.
Later incarnations of the Star would allow users to purchase a single unit with a laser printer, but the Xerox Star is still considered by many to be a commercial failure because only about 25,000 units were sold.
Some have said that the Star was ahead of its time -- few outside of a small circle of developers really understood the potential of the system. Consider that IBM introduced the IBM PC powered by the comparatively primitive PC-DOS the same year that the Star was brought to market. Even Apple's Lisa, inspired by the Star and introduced 2 years later was a market failure, for many of the same reasons as the Star. now. ...
IBM PC (IBM 5150) with keyboard and green screen monochrome monitor (IBM 5151), running MS-DOS 5. ...
IBM PC-DOS was one of the three major operating systems that dominated the personal computer market from about 1985 to 1995. ...
Apple Computer, Inc. ...
Apple Lisa The Apple Lisa was a revolutionary personal computer designed at Apple Computer during the early 1980s. ...
Another possible reason given for the lack of success of the Star lies with the corporate structure of Xerox itself. A longtime copier company, Xerox played to their strengths. They already had one significant failure under their belt in making their acquisition of Scientific Data Systems 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. A small, much-used Xerox copier in a high school library. ...
Scientific Data Systems, or SDS, was a computer company founded in September 1961 by Max Palevsky, a veteran of Packard Bell and Bendix, along with eleven other computer scientists. ...
Probably most significantly, Xerox strategic planners at the Xerox Systems Group (XSG) did not feel that they could compete against other workstation manufacturers such as Apollo Computers or Symbolics. The Xerox name alone was considered their greatest asset, but it did not produce customers. Apollo Computer, Inc. ...
Finally, by today's standards, the software would be considered very slow, taxing the limited hardware of the era. This was primarily due to a poorly implemented file system. Saving a large file could take minutes. Crashes could be followed by a hours long process called "scavenging". The diagnostic code '7511' would appear in the top left corner of the screen indicating a file scavenge. For some, this was too steep price to pay, even for such sophisticated software.
To give credit to Xerox, they did try many things in an attempt to jumpstart sales. The next release of Star was on a different more efficient hardware platform and involved significant rewriting to improve performance. The system was dubbed the Viewpoint 6085 and was released in 1985. The new hardware provide 1MB to 4MB of memory, a 10MB to 80MB hard disk, a 15" or 19" display, a 5.25" floppy drive, a mouse, Ethernet connector and a price of a little over $6,000.
Along with an attached laser printer, the Viewpoint could be sold as a standalone system. Also offered was a PC compatibility mode via an 8086 based expansion board. Users could transfer files between the Star system and PC based software. Even with a significantly reduced price, it was still a Rolls Royce in the world of inexpensive $2,000 personal computers.
In 1989, Viewpoint 2.0 introduced many new applications related to desktop publishing. Eventually, Xerox jettisoned the integrated hardware/software workstation offered by Viewpoint and offered the software only as GlobalView. This provided the Star interface and technology on an IBM PC compatible platform. The initial release required the installation of MESA CPU add-on board. The final release of GlobalView 2.1 ran as an emulator on top of Microsoft Windows 3.1, Windows 95 or Windows 98 and was released in 1996.
Legacy of the Star Even though the Star product failed to make an impact in the marketplace, it laid important groundwork for the computers of today. Many of the ideas in Star, such as WYSIWYG, Ethernet, and network services such as Directory, Print, File, and internetwork routing have become commonplace in computers of today. WYSIWYG (pronounced //, transcripted wizziwig), is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, used in computing to describe a system in which content during editing appears very similar to the final product. ...
Ethernet is a large and diverse family of frame-based computer networking technologies for local area networks (LANs). ...
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