The Elixir Desktop and its grandfather and father, The
Xerox Star 8010 and Viewpoint 6085
On June 17, 1998, at
a special session called at the Xerox
Palo Alto Research Center, the final public demonstration of
the original Xerox
Star 8010 computer system and interface was given. This event
was sponsored by Bay Area Computer History Perspectives and The Computer
Museum History Center (now the Computer
History Museum). You can read the original
announcement of this event here.
View videos of the entire Final Public Star Demo here (Quicktime streams)
Me (Bruce Damer) with the Xerox Star 8010 and 6085 at
their final public demonstrations
David Liddle and a cast of the original builders of the Xerox Star
8010 presented a heartfelt, humorous and informative presentation on
the background, engineering, trials and tribulations of bringing the
first desktop user interface metaphor to market.
Starting the final public Xerox Star 8010 Demo
David Canfield Smith then
presented the "last public demonstration" of the original
Star system. Dave Curbow is shown here running the video.
Bringing up a prop sheet during the final public demo
of the Xerox 8010 Star
He flawlessly undertook the creation of a compound document, demonstrating
the clean efficiency of the Star desktop, a consistency that is still
lacking in more "modern" desktop metaphors as implemented
on the Macintosh and Windows. The session was packed with people
crowded outside watching on monitors. Discussion went on until the Xerox
PARC staffers had to practically black out the place to get people
to move outside. Discussion continued on into the night at a Palo
Alto mexican restaurant.
View videos of the entire Final Public Star Demo here (Quicktime streams)
A
Direct Descendent of Star: the Elixir Desktop
Click on the images to get a larger
view
The Elixir Desktop and its applications
converted ordinary PCs into graphical workstations to create document
jobs for large printing systems from Xerox and other manufacturers, a
task the Xerox 8010 Star and Viewpoint 6085 systems failed to do.
Elixir Desktop from Xerox brochure
Coding began: August 1988
Product came to market: 1990
The Elixir desktop was and is the most
successful and sole surviving direct rendition of the Xerox
STAR 8010 interface on the industry standard PC platform.
Icons were taken directly from Star/6085 and scaled up for the higher
resolution Sigma and Wyse monitors. I built a complete windowing system
and custom icons were designed by Ed Regan of Down East Technologies
in Searsport Maine. We studied the Xerox 6085, Star 8010, 3 Rivers
PERQ and Apple Macintosh systems to make our decisions in the UI sphere.
I decided to implement drag and drop. The direct manipulation metaphor
of object copy/move was not fully implemented but object properties
were. Pulldown menus on both windows and on the whole system extended
beyond the Macintosh's limited implementation of a single menu strip.
The Elixir desktop brought a desktop metaphor and suite of applications
to the PC before Windows 3.0 and long before the appearance of a desktop
container in Windows 95. See the whole
story of Elixir and its
products.
Most powerful GEM Elixir Object Desktop from an October
1990 T-Shirt showing the reconfigurable process flow system
Extending to a general object
desktop metaphor. Built to drive the Xerox Docutech system launched that
year. The Elixir desktop served as an integrator of the Elixir applications
for forms, font and image creation, Ventura Publisher for long document
composition, and numerous DOS applications and drivers for printers, tape
drives and specialized floppy disk formats. The Object Desktop featured
a job ticket creator to drive the Docutech and other Xerox systems.
