Skip to content
Hallway
0:00 / 0:00

#xeroxstar#gui#xeroxparc

Xerox Star User Interface (1982) 1 of 2

VintageCG

47K subscribers • 1 video on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 1 person: 1 on Hacker News.

Beginner. No background in the topic needed.

337K views17 years ago1 recommendation

History and cultureSoftware designHistory of computingDesign patterns

A demonstration of the 1982 Xerox Star user interface, showcasing its desktop metaphor, document creation, networking, and printing capabilities.

First half of a demonstration of the Xerox Star user interface from 1982. The Lisa and Mac interfaces that would follow a couple years later are dismissed by some today as being merely a direct ripoff of Xerox's work...but in watching this it becomes apparent that Apple's UI was in fact an evolution of these concepts, not a 1:1 copy. The Star UI has little to no direct manipulation, nor any visual distinction for radio buttons or check boxes. In other places, such as networking and printing, the Star was many years ahead. The Star UI laid the foundation but it was not copied whole cloth as some will claim.

Why it's here

1 person recommends this

What people say. Engineers point to this demo to show the origins of the graphical user interface and discuss how early GUI concepts evolved.

thought_alarmon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Pictures of the first GUIs from Xerox”

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. link to 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
View on Hacker News

cooldealon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Steve Jobs biography -- Isaacson blew it”

Not sure if I am replying to a troll(plus much of the above is copy/paste or very similar to an earlier comment from you). >they've just heard the lie that Apple stole the GUI from Xerox (impossible since there was no GUI at Xerox at the time, in fact) The Apple haters also seem to uploading fake videos of a old Xerox GUI on Youtube! /sarcasm link link to this video > Both Apple and Google release the operating system as open source, and both Apple and Google keep as closed source the application layer where their proprietary apps live. For Apple, that's the UI, for google that's the Google Apps Sorry, Google Apps is not an application layer, however you wish it would be.
View on Hacker News

Pewpewarrowson Hacker News • Mentions

On “Peter Thiel: "I Don’t Consider [The iPhone] To Be A Technological Breakthrough"”

Yep, Xerox never invented the GUI. This entire product and all promotional videos and memories of it existing are a complete fabrication: link to this video You've made similar posts in the past, and they've been similarly filled with rambling inaccuracies. I'll just leave it at that.
View on Hacker News

pjmlpon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Tangle: a JavaScript library for reactive documents”

Except the original Lisp and Smalltalk environments are much more than a simple REPL. Sometimes I wish people would learn about computing history. Presentation from Kalman Reti about Lisp Machines, check the interactivity starting at 00:44:00 and how to introduce mouse sensitive images at 01:00:00 link Xerox presentations about Smalltalk-80 link link to this video link
View on Hacker News

pjmlpon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Shadow DOM”

Mainly videos Self link Xerox Star User Interface link to this video link Tektronix 4404 Smalltalk link The Smalltalk-80 Programming System link The Final Demonstration of the Xerox 'Star' computer link Symbolics Hypertext Document link
View on Hacker News

pjmlpon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Web Starter Kit”

Self link Xerox Star User Interface link to this video link Tektronix 4404 Smalltalk link The Smalltalk-80 Programming System link The Final Demonstration of the Xerox 'Star' computer link Symbolics Hypertext Document link Warren Teitelman work at Xerox PARC link The Mesa/Cedar programming environment link Steve Jobs internal demo of NeXTSTEP 3, link Alan Kay on Xerox PARC work link link link
View on Hacker News

pjmlpon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Grappling with Go”

Faire enough, so prepare for an history lesson. :) Mesa/Cedar was created at Xerox PARC, as an extension of the Xerox Star 8010 system, which was programmed in Mesa, the language that inspired Niklaus Wirth to create Modula-2. link link to this video link Mesa evolved to Mesa/Cedar, which allowed for automatic memory management via reference counting and a tracing collector for the cycles. link The environment had a REPL and debugger inspired by the Smalltalk and Lisp systems at Xerox. Think of Swift Playgrounds, kind of. This system inspired Niklaus Wirth to create Oberon, which you can read about in his book, about how the OS was built. link In 2013, Niklaus Wirth revised the language and upd…
View on Hacker News

gizmoon Hacker News • Mentions

On “How much your computer can do in a second”

…that allow you to go back and forward in time? Why can't we visualize the data structures in our program and trivially change the data layout to see how that affects performance? When I look at the demo of the Xerox Sparc interface (1982) and compare that to where we are today it's pretty clear to me we messed up big time somewhere along the road: link to this video…
View on Hacker News

romanivon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983”

…ugin/extensions/add-on they found and set up. All of that to do thing that should be trivial to begin with. One counter-point, though. > I make no secret of hating the mouse. If you look at the original uses of the mouse it was great. Especially in systems like Xerox Star. Star allowed people to perform complex tasks with almost no learning curve. link to this video (Note how they weren't shy of using keyboard either. There are dedicated hardware buttons for standard commands like copy, find, repeat, "properties" and even for common text editing actions. Meanwhile, our keyboards don't have dedicated keys for undo, redo, cut, copy and paste - operations that are used in almost every application today.)…
View on Hacker News

romanivon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Designing Windows 95’s User Interface”

> At the time, it was a huge leap forward in desktop computing. After seeing some old demos of Xerox Star, I'd question that. link to this video
View on Hacker News

gambleron Hacker News • Mentions

On “12 Factor CLI Apps”

…t the author of the parent post. It's fully rhetorical.) Did you know that icons were supposed to be live representations of in-memory objects? That objects were more fundamental for the OS than files? Did you know that windows were views onto those objects? Did you know that interactions to and between icons were synonymous with OOP polymorphism? link to this video And this isn't the best UI, it's simply the first modern UI.…
View on Hacker News

gambleron Hacker News • Mentions

On “Designing Windows 95's User Interface (2018)”

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: link to 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.
View on Hacker News

GeekyBearon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Xerox PARC – Office Alto Commercial (1979) [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. link to this video
View on Hacker News

aresanton Hacker News • Mentions

On “Apple Macintosh before System 7”

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) - link to this video
View on Hacker News