Xerox Star - Legacy

Legacy

Even though the Star product failed in the marketplace, it raised expectations and laid important groundwork for the computers of today. Many of the innovations behind the Star, such as WYSIWYG editing, Ethernet, and network services such as Directory, Print, File, and internetwork routing have become commonplace in computers of today.

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. Among the developers of the Gypsy editor, Larry Tesler left Xerox to join Apple in 1980 and Charles Simonyi left to join Microsoft in 1981 (whereupon Bill Gates spent $100,000 on a Xerox Star and laser printer), and several other defectors from PARC followed Simonyi to Microsoft in 1983.

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.

The list of products that were inspired or influenced by the user interface of the Star include the Apple Lisa, Apple's Macintosh, GEM from Digital Research (the DR-DOS 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. Adobe Systems PostScript was based on InterPress. Ethernet was further refined by 3Com, and has become the standard networking protocol.

Some people 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 complicated. Many patent disclosures were in fact submitted for the innovations in the Star; however, at the time the 1975 Xerox Consent Decree, an FTC antitrust action, placed restrictions on what the company was able to patent. In addition, 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 an untested legal area at that time.

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, it was thrown out because a three year statute of limitations had passed. (Apple eventually lost its lawsuit in 1994, losing all claims to the user interface).