Xerox Star

The Star workstation, officially known as the Xerox 8010 Information System, was the first commercial system to incorporate various technologies that have since become standard in personal computers, including a bitmapped display, a window-based graphical user interface, icons, folders, mouse (two-button), Ethernet networking, file servers, print servers and e-mail.

Introduced by Xerox Corporation in 1981, the name "Star" technically refers only to the software sold with the system for the office automation market. The 8010 workstations were also sold with LISP- and Smalltalk-based software, for the smaller research and software development market.

History

The Xerox Alto

The Xerox Star systems concept owes much to the Xerox Alto, an experimental workstation designed by the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The first Alto became operational in 1972. At first, only few Altos were built. Although by 1979 nearly 1,000 Ethernet-linked Altos were in use at Xerox and another 500 at collaborating universities and government offices, it was never intended to be a commercial product. While Xerox had started in 1977 a development project which worked to incorporate those innovations into a commercial product, their concept was an integrated document preparation system, centered around the (then expensive) laser printing technology and oriented towards large corporations and their trading partners. When that system was announced in 1981, the cost was about $75,000 ($195,000 in today's dollars) for a basic system, and $16,000 ($42,000 today) for each additional workstation.