

Pictures of the first GUIs from Xerox - coliveira
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-star-8010/index.html

======
thought_alarm
There are a few demos of the Xerox Star floating around on YouTube. Seeing it
in action gives you a much more complete picture of the system.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q>

The "look" was obviously hugely influential, the "feel" not so much. It is
quite an odd beast, as the mouse is actually only used for selecting objects.

The Lisa GUI prototypes are also and interesting bit of GUI trivia. It's easy
to see the Star's influence on the final shipping version of the Lisa GUI
compared to its prototypes.

<http://www.jeremyreimer.com/apple_screens.html>

~~~
pavlov
_It is quite an odd beast, as the mouse is actually only used for selecting
objects._

It's an interesting design. The mouse appears to be strictly reserved for
establishing a source object and a target location on-screen. The action to
perform using these two inputs is determined by physical buttons on the
keyboard -- Copy, Move, Show Properties...

(It is slightly confusing because some operations don't need two inputs. Does
"Show Properties" act upon the selected source object, or whatever is under
the location of the mouse cursor?)

The mouse-oriented design that won in the market (introduced with Mac, adopted
by Windows) ended up avoiding the keyboard in favour of much more complicated
mouse action gestures such as double-clicking, drag'n'drop, right-click menus.

I wonder if the Star design would have been more user-friendly in the end.
When I've helped older people with their computers, it seemed that they don't
make use of drag'n'drop or right-click menus at all. With this limitation,
they couldn't do something like duplicating a document without starting the
producer application and performing a "Save As" from its main menu.

~~~
guelo
> The mouse-oriented design that won in the market (introduced with Mac,
> adopted by Windows) ended up avoiding the keyboard in favour of much more
> complicated mouse action gestures such as double-clicking, drag'n'drop,
> right-click menus.

Nit picking here, but right-click was obviously not introduced with the single
button Mac mouse. And the awful double-click gesture was made necessary
because of this single button mouse, the original Apple sin.

~~~
pavlov
Sure. What I meant that Apple diverged from the Xerox UI path by designing the
Mac around the mouse, so that the keyboard was not necessary for any actions.
Microsoft basically took up that idea wholesale, simply extending it with more
widespread keyboard shortcuts (Alt key for menu accelerators) and new mouse-
centric gestures like right-clicking (borrowed from elsewhere of course).

In PC history, there were two opportunities to redesign the input hardware for
a new kind of GUI...

First was in 1987 when IBM introduced the PS/2. It was a play for IBM to
regain control of the wild west PC clone market, and failed as that, but the
PS/2 keyboard and mouse connector standards lived on for more than 15 years.
If IBM had revamped the keyboard at that point with something like the Star
action buttons, they would have become a part of the OS/2 GUI and subsequently
Windows.

Another junction was in 1995, when Microsoft launched Windows 95 and
introduced new keyboards with the Windows key. At this point Microsoft carried
so much weight with OEMs that I think they would have been able to push
through something more radical on the input device front, if they'd wanted.

------
rbanffy
I'm impressed by the utmost attention to details. I remember similar care when
working with educational software for Apple IIs - we limited our 50%
checkerboard pattern to 279x191 (instead of the 280x192 maximum) in order to
be able to do exactly the same rounded corners on all four corners of the
screen.

At times, the guy who came up with these ideas infuriated me, but, in
hindsight, I am very glad I surrounded myself with such perfectionists.

~~~
adriand
Likewise. The way the document icon evolved
([http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-
star-8...](http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-
star-8010/xerox-star-8010-14.jpg)) is impressive. Seven iterations and the
result is so good we're still using that icon today.

And, as a designer colleague pointed out, look how they thought out how the
corners of things would interact with 50% dot fill:
[http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-
star-8...](http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-
star-8010/xerox-star-8010-18.jpg)

------
Luyt
From the same site, stories from back then:

 _"My Cajun country upbringing had never taken me any further west than
Dallas. And since I wanted to make a good first impression on my new
California friends, I purchased a spanking new three-piece navy blue polyester
suit, super-wide ‘70s tie, platform shoes and the finest imitation naugahyde
briefcase I could find and made my first reservations at Rickey’s Hyatt House.

I arrived at the lobby of PARC, resplendent in polyester and cheap Old English
cologne, and was met by Charles Irby… ponytail, scruffy beard, tie-dyed
t-shirt, khaki shorts and Birkenstock sandals. He welcomed me warmly, and then
took me around to meet the eclectic cast of colorful characters and future
luminaries that made up the Star development team. As we toured the offices,
and the more folks I met, and the more beanbag chairs I saw, the more
conspicuous, foreign and puritanical I began to feel… a penguin in the company
of parrots. And yet, I was embraced and welcomed into this cadre of
characters. It would not take me long to assimilate."_

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mcritz
This is amazing! It’s hard to imagine these images are real given how complex
and beautiful the UI design is.

· Multiple fonts.

· Multiple, simultaneous languages.

· Dithered graphics to simulate value, tone, and shading.

· Rounded buttons.

· Use of line-weight to simulate dimension.

------
jgrahamc
I'm old enough to have used these machines and what's interesting is that I
remember well how much of a 'wow' it was to get to use a lovely user interface
like that. Since then I haven't seen a real step change in user interface
until we moved recently to sensitive touch screen devices.

------
pholbrook
I remember I was working on the desktop part of the system, and we were
implementing "background copy" - and the hardest part was figuring out what
the UI should be for doing a foreground copy vs a background copy. (The Star
had tiled windows, not overlapping, so there wasn't a model of just letting a
status window overlap.)

~~~
pholbrook
Whoops! Context lost when I posted that. What I was saying was .. I was a
programmer on Star from 82-89. I went straight from college to Xerox - and it
was like working in a time machine. Network based file and print servers,
email, directory services, mouse, GUI, etc etc. All on machines that had _at
most_ 1.5 megabytes of memory.

------
epenn
Actually the first GUIs from Xerox were on the Alto, which the Star is based
on (see: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto>). Although this is
certainly from the first that was available commercially.

Nonetheless, these screenshots are amazing and show how groundbreaking the GUI
concept was at the time.

------
daralthus
Worth to check out the "Mother of all demos" too, where Douglas Engelbart
shows of the mouse, email, wordprocessor etc. in 1968!

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos>

~~~
sp332
And if you're into watching long videos of what the digital future was
supposed to look like, Douglas Adams and Tom Baker made a documentary called
_Hyperland_ , and you can watch all 50 minutes of it here:
<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7190175107515525470#> or if you want
a shorter video, here's Ted Nelson with a short demo of Xanadu as it existed
in 2008: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En_2T7KH6RA>

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rplacd
The typography demos are oddly tasteful.
[http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-
star-8...](http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-
star-8010/xerox-star-8010-05.jpg) seems like a dig at the Lisa - it does seem
woefully inadequate there for DTP.

~~~
cshenoy
Xerox Star 8010 came out before Apple's Lisa. In fact, Jobs had his team grab
sneak peaks in Xerox PARC prior to the release of the Lisa.

~~~
rplacd
Oh dear - then I have no idea how the Lisa screenshot got there :O

------
pholbrook
This shot - [http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-
star-8...](http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-
star-8010/xerox-star-8010-10.jpg) \- third row down, second across - is
actually a screenshot of XDE, the Xerox Development Environment. The window is
Hardy, the XDE mail tool.

Note the use '!' to mark commands that you can click on.

------
bostonpete
Very impressive. One inconsistency stands out given the careful attention to
detail. In this image, they make a point of emphasizing that background pixels
should be split to form a cleaner edge:

[http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-
star-8...](http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-
star-8010/xerox-star-8010-15.jpg)

...but this image shows that most of the top of a folder icon (not including
the tab) did not split the background pixel:

[http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-
star-8...](http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-
star-8010/xerox-star-8010-12.jpg)

~~~
reedlaw
What do they mean by splitting background pixels? Something like dithering?

~~~
biot
The background contains vertical bars 2 pixels high. The edge of the icon
should therefore be positioned so that only 1 pixel of the vertical bars is
showing rather than having both pixels showing. Also the left and right edges
should have the whitespace between the vertical bars showing rather than the
vertical bars directly adjacent to the left and right edges.

Also, I'm only seeing the inconsistency in the concave parts of the icons. The
outer border is fully consistent with the design guidelines.

------
rsbrown
Wow, I see the Mac, Amiga and other next gen UIs that came soon afterwards in
these. I'm also struck by how much more appealing these screenshots appear
than the early versions of Microsoft Windows.

------
elliottcarlson
Seems to be down for me - gotta love CoralCDN:
[http://www.digibarn.com.nyud.net/collections/screenshots/xer...](http://www.digibarn.com.nyud.net/collections/screenshots/xerox-
star-8010/index.html)

------
coldnose
Am I mistaken, or is this a whole-cloth Lisa screenshot?

[http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-
star-8...](http://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-
star-8010/xerox-star-8010-05.jpg)

------
shin_lao
I'm pretty sure someone could come up with a skin for a desktop (KDE, Gnome,
whatever...) very close to these screenshots and it would still feel very
modern.

Timeless classic?

ps: Too bad the JPG compression is that heavy!

------
rudiger
Over thirty years later and so _little_ has changed... I think Alan Kay had a
quote about there being no significant new inventions in computing since 1980.

~~~
sp332
It wasn't just a quote, he posed the question to StackOverflow.
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-
in...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-inventions-
in-computing-since-1980)

~~~
rudiger
I remember this from before StackOverflow existed, but nice to see it there.

------
kingsidharth
This get's us back to basics. It's interesting how some things like "Title
bar" and Scrolling never changed.

------
RyanMcGreal
I'm getting a "Network Error (dns_server_failure)" when I try to load the
site.

------
nixy
Wow, it even had a wallpaper.

------
hootmon
I will never understand why Xerox did not sue the pants off Jobs when he stole
99% of this visual gui design and then claimed forever onward that Apple was
responsible for it.

The thing that killed this was at that time no company was going to spend
close to the salary of a typist to outfit said typist with this kit. (I
believe it was in the 10-20K range.)

~~~
schrototo
Because in exchange for letting Apple engineers visit their research labs for
three days, Xerox got a million dollars in pre-IPO Apple stock.

