Cited on HN 9 times, 2014–2024, never outright recommendedscore 0
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN people point to it as a primary-source look at Star's interface design, especially its philosophy of fewer commands without fewer functions.
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.
“Star had many fewer commands than today's systems, and it didn't do it by having fewer functions; it just had fewer commands .” (HN, 2015)
Mainly videos Self [link] Xerox Star User Interface [link] [link] Tektronix 4404 Smalltalk [link] The Smalltalk-80 Programming System [link] The Final Demonstration of the Xerox 'Star' computer [this video] Symbolics Hypertext Document [link]
Self [link] Xerox Star User Interface [link] [link] Tektronix 4404 Smalltalk [link] The Smalltalk-80 Programming System [link] The Final Demonstration of the Xerox 'Star' computer [this video] Symbolics Hypertext Document [link] Warren Teitelman work at Xerox PARC [link] The Mesa/Cedar programming environment [link] Steve Jobs internal demo of NeXTSTEP 3, [link] Alan Kay on Xerox PARC work [link] [link] [link]
And current designers and product managers build crippled products. “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, Xerox Star human factors designer, in the ‘Final Demo’ [this video]
Star designer on having fewer commands, not fewer functions
“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 Smith¹ at The Final Demonstration of the Xerox ‘Star’ Computer² Most UX designers are not as good as David Smith; they worship Apple/Jobs' “function follows form” misunderstanding of the Star GUI, and think you need to remove functionality in order to remove complexity. ¹ [link] ² video: [this video] text: [link]
Star designer on fewer commands without fewer functions
> you have two hands. Every watch ‘the mother of all demos’⁰? Engelbart's system was designed to be used with one hand on the mouse and the other on the chordset. Xerox followed this with the Alto, and on to the Star¹, eventually dropping the chordset but with the same model: the mouse and the left-side function key block worked together.² ⁰ [link] ¹ [link] ² [this video]
> The easiest way to achieve that is simply to remove functionality The easiest way, yes. I am reminded again of the point made by Dave Smith, one of the Xerox Star human factors designers, at the ‘Final Demo’¹: “Star had many fewer commands than today's systems, and it didn't do it by having fewer functions — it just had fewer commands .” PARC weren't trying to make things easy on themselves . Genericity is hard. Orthogonality is hard. Design is hard. (It's unfortunate that Steve Jobs either didn't understand what he saw, or didn't care, and popularized a Potemkin village imitation.) ¹ [this video] (The particular session starts around 54:30.)
Star designer on fewer commands while keeping functionality
> 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: [this video] text: [link] )
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" [this video] The end of the road from Plan 9, Inferno. [link] [link]
> 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) [this video]
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