Xerox Star User Interface (1982) 1 of 2

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. ▶ this video 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. link

> The Star left cluster are primarily operations that pair the left hand on the keys with the right hand on the mouse. Sure (this is demonstrated in the linked video, for instance) but the ZXCV group is pretty similar in that respect. Even for operations which involve the mouse it's preferable to drag only one hand far away from its home position, rather than both of them. (Especially since the video evidence ▶ this video seems to suggest that Star users tended to move their left hand only after making the mouse selection, instead of prepositioning it.) And the Star's Undo key, which presumably doesn't require help from mouse input and is likely to be needed after a non-mouse action, isn't placed any more conveniently near the home row: it's simply in the right side-cluster rather than the left one.

FYI if interested in visuals for the earlier system OS System .85! - link (December 4, 1983) System 1 - link System 2 - link System 3 - link System 4 - link System 5 - link System 6 - link (April 1988) Bonus round - Xerox Star UX (1982) - ▶ this video

> How did IBM and Apple take over and Xerox end up as a has-been also ran? They were too far ahead of their time. The component costs needed to come down first. In 1981, the "starter kit" for their office system consisted of one Xerox Star for a user, a second Star to act as a file and print server, and a laser printer for about a quarter of a million dollars in today's money. Each additional networked Star that you added was about $50,000 in today's money. Even at those prices, the system wasn't exactly snappy. I do wonder what would have happened if they had kept iterating on the product until faster, cheaper components arrived. ▶ this video

Worth remembering: the original windowed interface on Xerox machines was a view into underlying system objects. It was designed around a unified vocabulary of interactions that allowed user to message those objects and also direct inter-object communication: ▶ this video Xerox -> Apple -> Microsoft interface transfer preserved nothing of those core concepts. UI became a crutch developers grudgingly added to the system for "those stupid users". Thus, most software engineers today are still convinced that a teletype emulation is the best possible interface to the underlying OS that can possibly exist. Also, normal users are treated as second-class citizens in their own systems.