Riiven Reverb

Xerox Star 8010

In 1981, Xerox shipped the desktop most operating systems still copy. It cost $16,595 and Xerox sold it through its copier sales force.

Unseen · 1981–1985 · 4 min read

Xerox Star 8010 — Photo by Min An / Pexels

The Moment

In 1981, the office was a paper organism. Filing cabinets ran wall-length, IBM Selectrics hammered against rubber platens, and a "computer" still meant a refrigerator-sized minicomputer kept in a locked room downstairs. The IBM PC would not be announced for four more months, and "personal computing" mostly meant an Apple II on an enthusiast's desk. Inside Xerox, the Palo Alto Research Center had spent the previous decade quietly building the future of office work: bitmapped displays, mice, on-screen documents that printed exactly as drawn, computers wired together by a coaxial cable they had named Ethernet. That April, the company's Systems Development Department in El Segundo announced it was finally going to sell what PARC had been building.

The Original

The product was called the Xerox 8010 Star Information System. The team came out of the Systems Development Department, led by David Liddle, with Charles Irby, David Smith, Ralph Kimball, and Bill Verplank as principal designers. They had spent four years at the Systems Development Department turning PARC's research into a shipping product. The desktop they shipped was the desktop most of the world still uses. A bitmapped 17-inch portrait display. A two-button mouse. Icons that represented documents, folders, in-baskets, out-baskets, printers, and people. Direct manipulation: you dragged a document into a folder by moving the mouse, not by typing a path. WYSIWYG composition: what you laid out on screen was what the laser printer produced. Each Star plugged into Ethernet and shared files, mail, and printing with its neighbours. Three workstations and a file server and a print server, sold together, came to roughly seventy-five thousand dollars.

The Gap

· Reach failure

Xerox had built the right machine and had nowhere to sell it. The Star list-priced at $16,595 for a single workstation in 1981 money, about $57,000 today, and the office was sold as a system: server, printer, cabling, training. A minimum install ran past seventy-five thousand dollars and reached past a hundred thousand once a department wanted real seats. The buyer's calculation was settled four months later. In August, IBM shipped the 5150 Personal Computer at $1,565. It was cruder by every measure the Star team cared about, and it ran on an open architecture that any other company could build software for. The Star was a closed environment. Outside developers could not write programs for it. The thing that made the Macintosh inevitable, a third-party software market, was structurally impossible on a Star. The sales channel made the gap permanent. Xerox put the workstation in the hands of its copier sales force, who were paid on copier quotas and trained to sell consumables. Roughly twenty-five thousand Stars shipped over the product's life. IBM passed that number with the PC inside a single quarter.

approximately 25,000 workstations sold over the product's life (1981-1985)

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Xerox Star User Interface (1982) 1 of 2

VintageCG

The Echo → 1984

Apple's Lisa team had visited PARC in 1979 to see the Alto, the research prototype. They saw the Star when it shipped two years later and finished the Lisa in 1983 at $9,995. The Macintosh followed in 1984 at $2,495. Charles Simonyi, who had built the first WYSIWYG editor at PARC, joined Microsoft in 1981 and turned Word into the application that paid for Windows. Larry Tesler, who had defined modeless editing on the Alto, joined Apple and put cut, copy, paste, and undo into the Lisa. By the time Windows 3.0 reached general release in 1990, every productivity computer sold in the world was running a version of the desktop the Star had shipped first: icons, mouse, files inside folders, network printing, on-screen pages that matched the printed page. The Star reference manual from 1981 named features that every later operating system would eventually adopt.

Why Now

The Star had no buyer because Xerox had no channel through which to sell it. The engineering was finished, the workstation cost more than a small car, and the copier sales force was paid on toner. The same product reappeared inside Apple and Microsoft, on cheaper machines, through stores that knew what computers were. When a piece of research arrives years before its company knows how to sell it, who decides whether the company is the right vehicle to ship it?

Xerox Star 8010

Sources

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