What they engineered was a powerful but expensive machine with a high-resolution monochrome bitmapped display, an internal hard disk, and robust local area networking support through Ethernet, which Xerox invented. The Xerox 8010 “Star” Information System desktop. The Xerox 8010 Information System emerged from Xerox’s Systems Development Department (SDD) and featured the work of the aforementioned David Canfield Smith and Norm Cox, as well as a team of others that included Dave Liddle, Charles Irby, Ralph Kimball, Bill Verplank, Wallace Judd, and more. RELATED: What Are Computer Files and Folders? Xerox Star 8010 Information System Specs It wasn’t quite as flexible as some desktop-based GUIs that came after the Star, but it undoubtedly pioneered the desktop-and-icon-based computers we commonly use today. Ultimately, the Star interface proved familiar to office workers, and Smith says in his speech that it was received well during testing.
“The turned-down corner inspiration came from an icon embossed on the office copier that instructed users how to correctly insert documents into the feeder–face up or face down.” Xerox/Norm Cox/Digibarn “Initially the document icon was difficult to visually indicate a piece of paper,” says Cox. Digibarn/Mega Pixel/Ĭox had more trouble drawing a generic document icon, whose design went through several iterations. “It was probably the easiest of all the icons to render, since it had such a common real-world representation (the ubiquitous manila folder) with a very distinct shape.” The Xerox Star folder borrowed its design from manila folders. “The folder was a real-world metaphor for the computing ‘directory’ file,” wrote Cox in an email to How-To Geek.
After several iterations of experimental icons, a Xerox graphic designer named Norm Cox drew the Star’s final interface, which included the first document and folder icons used in computer history. Unsurprisingly, icons played a huge part in the Xerox Star interface. “I literally looked around my office and created an icon for everything I saw,” said Smith in a 2020 award speech recorded for the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer–Human Interaction (SIGCHI). He settled on visual, on-screen representations of real-world objects such as file cabinets, folders, and in-baskets that office workers used every day. In the process, Smith invented the computer icon, first outlined in his 1975 doctoral thesis.Īs an extension of that, Smith realized that he needed a metaphor that office workers already understood. When Xerox tasked David Canfield Smith with figuring out how ordinary office workers could use Xerox’s new bitmapped computer system, Smith drew on his research work with graphical computing, where a computer could be programmed visually.
RELATED: The Modern PC Archetype: Use a 1970s Xerox Alto in Your Browser Origin of The Desktop Metaphor That job fell to David Canfield Smith of Xerox, who invented the desktop metaphor for the 1981 Xerox Star 8010 Information System. When it came time to commercialize the Alto into a shippable product in the late 1970s, Xerox needed an interface that could ease office professionals without computer training into using computers. In the early 1970s, Xerox began to experiment with a new graphical approach that culminated in its revolutionary Xerox Alto computer, which utilized a mouse and a bitmapped display. The Xerox Star arguably made computers user-friendly for the first time. They weren’t very user-friendly and required specialized training to program or operate properly. In the 1960s and 70s, most computers were large, expensive devices operated using batch-processing with punched cards or through interactive command-line operating systems accessed through teletypes or video display terminals.