The Xerox Star: a retrospective

Publisher Summary This chapter presents an overview of Xerox Star. Xerox introduced the 8010 “Star” Information System in April of 1981. That introduction was an important event in the history of personal computing because it changed notions of how interactive systems should be designed. Star was designed as an office automation system. The idea was that professionals in a business or organization would have workstations on their desks and would use them to produce, retrieve, distribute, and organize documentation, presentations, memos, and reports. All the workstations in an organization would be connected via Ethernet and would share access to file servers, printers, etc. Star's designers assumed that the target users were interested in getting their work done and not at all interested in computers. Therefore, an important design goal was to make the computer as invisible to users as possible. The applications included in the system were those that office professionals would supposedly need: (1) documents, (2) business graphics, (3) tables, (4) personal databases, and (5) electronic mail.