Members of the Apple Lisa engineering team saw Star at its introduction at the National Computer Conference (NCC '81) and returned to Cupertino where they converted their desktop manager to an icon-based interface modeled on the Star.[13] Among the developers of Xerox's Gypsy WYSIWYG editor, Larry Tesler left Xerox to join Apple in 1980 where he also developed the MacApp framework.
Charles Simonyi left Xerox to join Microsoft in 1981 where he developed first WYSIWYG version of Microsoft Word (3.0) and beyond,[14] and several other defectors from PARC followed Simonyi to Microsoft in 1983.[15]
Star, Viewpoint and GlobalView were the first commercial computing environments to offer support for most natural languages, including full-featured word processing, leading to their adoption by the Voice of America, other United States foreign affairs agencies, and several multinational corporations.[16]
The list of products that were inspired or influenced by the user interface of the Star, and to a lesser extent the Alto, include the Apple Lisa and Macintosh, Graphics Environment Manager (GEM) from Digital Research (the CP/M company), Microsoft Windows, Atari ST, BTRON from TRON Project, Commodore's Amiga, Elixir Desktop, Metaphor Computer Systems, Interleaf, IBM OS/2, OPEN LOOK (co-developed by Xerox), SunView, KDE, Ventura Publisher, and NEXTSTEP.[17] Adobe Systems PostScript was based on Interpress. Ethernet was further refined by 3Com, and has become a de facto standard networking protocol.
Some people, like Dominic Connor, feel that Apple, Microsoft, and others plagiarized the GUI and other innovations from the Xerox Star, and believe that Xerox didn't properly protect its intellectual property. The truth is more complex, perhaps. Many patent disclosures were submitted for the innovations in the Star. However, at the time, the 1975 Xerox Consent Decree, an Federal Trade Commission (FTC) antitrust action, placed restrictions on what the firm was able to patent.[18] Also, when the Star disclosures were being prepared, the Xerox patent attorneys were busy with several other new technologies such as laser printing. Finally, patents on software, particularly those relating to user interfaces, were then an untested legal area.
Xerox did go to trial to protect the Star user interface. In 1989, after Apple sued Microsoft for copyright infringement of its Macintosh user interface in Windows, Xerox filed a similar lawsuit against Apple. However, this suit was thrown out on procedural grounds, not substantive, because a three-year statute of limitations had passed. In 1994, Apple lost its suit against Microsoft, not only the issues originally contested, but all claims to the user interface.[19]
See also
References
- "Copyright: Apple vs. Microsoft". New York Times. Retrieved 2007-02-08. An index of NYT articles concerning both the Apple/Microsoft suit and the Xerox/Apple suit
External links
- The first GUIs - Chapter 2. History: A Brief History of User Interfaces
- Star graphics: An object-oriented implementation
- Traits: An approach to multiple-inheritance subclassing
- The design of Star's records processing: data processing for the noncomputer professional
- The Xerox "Star": A Retrospective.
- The Xerox "Star": A Retrospective. (with full-size screenshots)
- Dave Curbow's Xerox Star Historical Documents (at the Digibarn)
- The Digibarn's pages on the Xerox Star 8010 Information System
- Xerox Star 1981
- HCI Review of the Xerox Star
- GUI of Xerox Star
- Video: Xerox Star User Interface (1982)
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