
The Xerox Star: A Retrospective (1989) [pdf] - mpweiher
http://www-lb.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2008/cmsc198G/Handouts/XeroxStar.pdf
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DonHopkins
Go Terps! UMD has a lot of experience with Xerox Stars.

When Mark Weiser [1] was at the University of Maryland, he talked Xerox PARC
into donating a huge pile of Xerox Star workstations, printers, file servers,
software and money to the University of Maryland CS Department, so even the
secretaries could use them to make posters announcing the annual CS Department
picnic.

So when we eventually got our hands on a 512K "Fat Mac", it was kind of a
disappointment that seemed like a tiny slow little low resolution one-button
Xerox Star without any networking or hard disk.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Weiser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Weiser)

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valuearb
Well the Xerox Star was $16,000, the Mac $2,000. And the Mac did have
localTalk, a super cheap 232 kbps office network that worked really well.

When the Mac was released, the Xerox team actually had a much different
reaction than yours. Notice the screen shots in the PDF, every object fits in
a rectangular area. The original Mac supported non-rectangular regions, making
it's graphics far more advanced than the Star, despite the much lower power
hardware. Xerox engineers were flabbergasted the Mac could do that.

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leejoramo
Indeed, one of the big reasons for the Mac's early success was built-in
networking.

GUI + standard networking + laser printer = revolution of graphics design and
production

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digi_owl
And may be providing Apple an inside track with MSM to this day...

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gumby
I wrote microcode for the Dandelion (we used the internal names for the
machines at PARC). You could boot it into completely disjoint worlds:
Smalltalk, Mesa, Interlisp (this is what I used) or the Star environment --
they weren't simply apps running under a common OS.

After the Alto, all of PARC's custom workstations (Dolphin, Dorado -- an ECL
machine!, and the Dandelion) were generically called D-machines.

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jbotz
The Xerox star: so far ahead of its time, it's still ahead of its time.

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pjmlp
The Xerox Star alongside Mesa and Tajo/XDE development environment was a great
system, with type safety, developer and user productivity in mind.

~~~
rdzogschen
Interesting to see that GUI essentials have not changed that much.

