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Xerox Star 8010
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| Also known as | Xerox 8010 Information System |
|---|---|
| Developer | Xerox |
| Manufacturer | Xerox |
| Product family | 8000-series |
| Type | Workstation |
| Release date | 1981 |
| Introductory price | $16,500 (equivalent to $43,467 in 2016) |
| Discontinued | 1985 |
| Operating system | Pilot |
| CPU | AMD Am2900 based |
| Memory | 384 KiB, expandable to 1.5 MiB |
| Storage | 10, 29, or 40 MB hard drive and 8" floppy drive |
| Display | 17 inch |
| Graphics | 1024×800 pixels @ 38.7 Hz |
| Connectivity | Ethernet |
| Successor | ViewPoint (Xerox 6085) |
Introduced by Xerox Corporation in 1981, the name Star technically refers only to the software sold with the system for the office automation market. The 8010 workstations were also sold with software based on the programming languages Lisp and Smalltalk, for the smaller research and software development market.
Contents
History
The Xerox Alto
Main article: Xerox Alto
The Xerox Star systems concept owes much to the Xerox Alto, an experimental workstation designed by the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The first Alto became operational in 1972. At first, only few Altos were built.[1]
Although by 1979 nearly 1,000 Ethernet-linked Altos were in use at
Xerox and another 500 at collaborating universities and government
offices,[2] it was never intended to be a commercial product.[3]
While Xerox had started in 1977 a development project which worked to
incorporate those innovations into a commercial product, their concept
was an integrated document preparation system, centered around the (then
expensive) laser printing technology and oriented towards large corporations and their trading partners. When that system was announced in 1981,[2]
the cost was about $75,000 ($198,000 in today's dollars) for a basic
system, and $16,000 ($42,000 today) for each added workstation.The Xerox Star development process
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The development team was headed by David Liddle, and would eventually grow to more than 200 developers. A good part of the first year was taken up by meetings and planning, the result of which was an extensive and detailed functional specification, internally termed the "Red Book". This became the bible for all development tasks. It defined the interface and enforced consistency in all modules and tasks. All changes to the functional specification had to be approved by a review team which maintained standards rigorously.
One group in Palo Alto worked on the underlying operating system interface to the hardware and programming tools. Teams in El Segundo and Palo Alto collaborated on developing the user interface and user applications.
The staff relied heavily on the technologies they were working on, file sharing, print servers and e-mail. They were even connected to the Internet, then named Arpanet, which helped them communicate between El Segundo and Palo Alto.
The Star was implemented in the programming language Mesa, a direct precursor to Modula-2 and Modula-3.[4] Mesa was not object-oriented, but tools and programming techniques were developed which allowed pseudo object-oriented design and programming. Mesa required creating two files for every module. A definition module specified data structures and procedures for each object, and one or more implementation modules contained the code for the procedures.
The Star team used a sophisticated integrated development environment (IDE), named internally Tajo and externally Xerox Development Environment (XDE). Tajo had many similarities with the Smalltalk-80 environment, but it had many added tools. For example, the version control system DF, which required programmers to check out modules before they could be changed. Any change in a module which would force changes in dependent modules were closely tracked and documented. Changes to lower level modules required various levels of approval.
The software development process was intense. It involved much prototyping and user testing. The software engineers had to develop new network communications protocols and data-encoding schemes when those used in PARC's research environment proved inadequate.
Initially, all development was done on Alto workstations. These were not well suited to the extreme burdens placed by the software. Even the processor intended for the product proved inadequate and involved a last minute hardware redesign. Many software redesigns, rewrites, and late additions had to be made, variously based on results from user testing, and marketing and systems considerations.
A Japanese language version of the system was produced in conjunction with Fuji Xerox, code named J-Star, and full support for international customers.
In the end, many features from the Star Functional Specification were not implemented. The product had to get to market, and the last several months before release focused on reliability and performance.
System features
User interface
Compound document and desktop of 8010/40 system
Evolution of the used document icon shape
One of the main designers of the Star, Dr. David Canfield Smith, invented the concept of computer icons and the desktop metaphor, in which the user would see a desktop that contained documents and folders, with different icons representing different types of documents.[5][6][7] Clicking any icon would open a window. Users would not start programs first (e.g., a text editor, graphics program or spreadsheet software), they would simply open the file and the appropriate application would appear.
The Star user interface was based on the concept of objects. For example, a word processing document would hold page objects, paragraph objects, sentence objects, word objects, and character objects. The user could select objects by clicking on them with the mouse, and press dedicated special keys on the keyboard to invoke standard object functions (open, delete, copy, move) in a uniform way. There was also a "Show Properties" key used to display settings, called property sheets, for the particular object (e.g., font size for a character object). These general conventions greatly simplified the menu structure of all the programs.
Object integration was designed into the system from the start. For example, a chart object created in the graphing module could be inserted into any type of document. This type of ability eventually became available as part of the operating system on the Apple Lisa and was featured in Mac OS System 7 as Publish and Subscribe. It became available on Microsoft Windows with the introduction of Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) in 1990. This approach was also later used on the OpenDoc software platform in the mid-to-late 1990s, and in the AppleWorks (originally ClarisWorks) package available for the Apple Mac (1991) and Microsoft Windows (1993).
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