X-Nico

6 unusual facts about Xerox Star


David Liddle

David Liddle is co-founder of Interval Research Corporation, consulting professor of computer science at Stanford University, and credited with heading development of the groundbreaking Xerox Star computer system.

Stacking window manager

Early 1980s: The Xerox Star, successor to the alto, used tiling for most main application windows, and used overlapping only for dialogue windows removing the need for full stacking.

Tiling window manager

The first Xerox Star system (released in 1981) tiled application windows, but allowed dialogs and property windows to overlap.

Visi On

In July 1981 Xerox announced the Xerox Star workstation, and by that point it was a well known "secret" that Apple Computer was working on a low-cost version that would later be known as the Lisa.

Window manager

In the early 1980s, the Xerox Star, successor to the Alto, used tiling for most main application windows, and used overlapping only for dialogue boxes, removing most of the need for stacking.

Xerox Star

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 and other United States foreign affairs agencies as well as a number of multinational corporations.


GlobalView

GlobalView was an integrated “desktop environment” including word-processing, desktop-publishing, and simple calculation (spreadsheet) and database functionality, developed at Xerox Parc as a way to run the software originally developed for their Xerox Alto, Xerox Star and Xerox Daybreak 6085 specialized workstations on SUN Microsystems workstations and IBM PC-based platforms.


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