Tech before its time: Xerox's shooting Star computer

By Jamie Condliffe

Read more: “Tech before its time: Six gadgets too good, too soon“

Imagine trying to print a document in 1977. Are you at home? If so, forget it – your only hope of finding a printer is at work, where there might be a single dot-matrix device shared by the whole building. Sitting in front of your terminal, you will have to painstakingly key in complex lines of code to initiate printing and get the formatting you want. Don’t even think about generating pictures or different colours. Now you’re in for a long wait – with an output of less than 200 characters per second, the printer would have taken more than half a second just to print this sentence.

The company that released us from this torture was Xerox PARC, the Silicon Valley research incubator. Run by the company that pioneered photocopying, it also gave the world Ethernet networking and laser printers.

In 1977, drawing on its unofficial maxim “the best way to predict the future is to invent it”, Xerox PARC assembled the brightest graduates in the US to produce the Xerox 8010 Information System. Also dubbed the Xerox Star, it was like nothing anyone had ever seen. A 17-inch bitmapped display provided a window-based graphical user interface, pioneering the desktop metaphor we now take for granted. Alongside a keyboard, users could manipulate objects on the screen with something called a mouse. Ethernet connectivity brought with it file servers, networked printers and email, precisely the tools you needed to retrieve files and be freed of keying text into a command line. For printing, the system was a game-changer. …