Computer History Museum
9 HN mentions · mentioned in 9 months, 2014–2024
2:20:15 · 22K views · Oct 23, 2013
A Computer History Museum recording of the final demonstration of the Xerox Star, the early graphical user interface workstation. It is a long demo session that shows the design thinking behind desktop, icons and windows.
HN people point to it as a primary-source look at Star's interface design, especially its philosophy of fewer commands without fewer functions.
9 comments from Hacker News
> So why haven’t you heard of him? Because you've had your head under a rock? It was headline news when he died (which was after this was published). > “And the question I remember most was from Steve Jobs. He said, ’You guys are sitting on a gold mine here. Why aren’t you making this a product?’” Xerox WAS making it into a product (the Star). Of course Larry couldn't tell him about that. It failed, just like the Lisa did. > As one of Tesler’s first tasks at PARC, he and a co-worker wrote a paper on the future of interactive computing, which for the first time talked about cut-and-paste as a way of moving blocks of text, images, and the like. It also described representing documents and other office objects stored on the computer as tiny images—icons—instead of as a list of names [see photo, ]. The "co-worker" was David Canfield Smith, who was directly involved in the Star, unlike Larry. [LINK] . (he IS a little stiff in this) this video
> The easiest way to achieve that is simply to remove functionality The easiest way, yes. I am reminded again of the point made by Dave Smith, one of the Xerox Star human factors designers, at the ‘Final Demo’¹: “Star had many fewer commands than today's systems, and it didn't do it by having fewer functions — it just had fewer commands .” PARC weren't trying to make things easy on themselves . Genericity is hard. Orthogonality is hard. Design is hard. (It's unfortunate that Steve Jobs either didn't understand what he saw, or didn't care, and popularized a Potemkin village imitation.) ¹ this video (The particular session starts around 54:30.)
Anything based on the workstation concepts explored at Xerox PARC, and further pursued at ETHZ, TI and Genera. Bitsavers has all the necessary papers and manuals, and computer museum as well. Here are some video sessions. "Yesterday's Computer of Tomorrow: The Xerox Alto │Smalltalk-76 Demo" [LINK] "Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk" [LINK] "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" [LINK] "The Final Demonstration of the Xerox 'Star' computer" this video The end of the road from Plan 9, Inferno. [LINK] [LINK]
“Star had many fewer commands than today’s systems, and it didn’t do it by having fewer functions. It just had fewer commands.” — Dave Smith¹ at The Final Demonstration of the Xerox ‘Star’ Computer² Most UX designers are not as good as David Smith; they worship Apple/Jobs' “function follows form” misunderstanding of the Star GUI, and think you need to remove functionality in order to remove complexity. ¹ [LINK] ² video: this video text: [LINK]
Self [LINK] Xerox Star User Interface [LINK] [LINK] Tektronix 4404 Smalltalk [LINK] The Smalltalk-80 Programming System [LINK] The Final Demonstration of the Xerox 'Star' computer this video 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]