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The Final Demonstration of the Xerox 'Star' computer

Computer History Museum · 22K views · 2013-10-23 · 2:20:15

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Overview

A Computer History Museum recording of the final demonstration of the Xerox Star, the early graphical user interface workstation. It is a long demo session that shows the design thinking behind desktop, icons and windows.

On Hacker News

HN people point to it as a primary-source look at Star's interface design, especially its philosophy of fewer commands without fewer functions.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2014–2024

Topics

GUI, HCI & interface historyHistory of computing
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xerox starparcguihcicomputer history

What people said

AlbertCory · 2024-08 · Reference

> So why haven’t you heard of him? Because you've had your head under a rock? It was headline news when he died (which was after this was published). > “And the question I remember most was from Steve Jobs. He said, ’You guys are sitting on a gold mine here. Why aren’t you making this a product?’” Xerox WAS making it into a product (the Star). Of course Larry couldn't tell him about that. It failed, just like the Lisa did. > As one of Tesler’s first tasks at PARC, he and a co-worker wrote a paper on the future of interactive computing, which for the first time talked about cut-and-paste as a way of moving blocks of text, images, and the like. It also described representing documents and other office objects stored on the computer as tiny images—icons—instead of as a list of names [see photo, ]. The "co-worker" was David Canfield Smith, who was directly involved in the Star, unlike Larry. [LINK] . (he IS a little stiff in this) [VIDEO]

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pjmlp · 2020-05 · Reference

Anything based on the workstation concepts explored at Xerox PARC, and further pursued at ETHZ, TI and Genera. Bitsavers has all the necessary papers and manuals, and computer museum as well. Here are some video sessions. "Yesterday's Computer of Tomorrow: The Xerox Alto │Smalltalk-76 Demo" [LINK] "Alto System Project: Dan Ingalls demonstrates Smalltalk" [LINK] "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar" [LINK] "The Final Demonstration of the Xerox 'Star' computer" [VIDEO] The end of the road from Plan 9, Inferno. [LINK] [LINK]

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kps · 2019-10 · Reference

> I've watched both sandbag good design because there was no percieved business value more than once. Riffing on the article title: Simple Does Not Mean Deficient. “Star had many fewer commands than today’s systems, and it didn’t do it by having fewer functions. It just had fewer commands.” — Dave Smith at The Final Demonstration of the Xerox ‘Star’ Computer (video: [VIDEO] text: [LINK] )

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Sources

Video by Computer History Museum, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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