Xerox Star 8010

Year: 1981
Creator: David Liddle, David Canfield Smith, Charles Irby
Company: Xerox
Location: El Segundo and Palo Alto, California
Room: Homebrew ↗

Description

The Xerox Star 8010 is an office workstation with a bitmapped screen, a two-button mouse, and an Ethernet connection. Xerox introduced it in April 1981 as part of a networked office system with file servers and laser printers.

Importance

The Star put the ideas of the Xerox Alto into a product that offices could buy. It was the first commercial computer to show documents and folders as icons on a desktop. Apple later changed the interface of its Lisa computer to icons after its engineers saw the Star.

Interesting fact

Star designer David Canfield Smith took the idea of computer icons from Pygmalion, the program he wrote for his doctoral thesis.

Sources

The Xerox Star: A Retrospective (IEEE Computer, September 1989) ↗Jeff Johnson, Teresa L. Roberts, William Verplank, David C. Smith, Charles H. Irby, Marian Beard, Kevin Mackey; reprinted by GUIdebook · 1989
Xerox Star ↗Wikipedia