In 1981, Xerox introduced the Star Office Information System.
The radical user interface of star
had a major impact on the office system and personal computer
industry.
Star introduced the use of icons to represent
objects and applications.
The desktop metaphor with a direct manipulation
interface, windows containing multimedia documents, property
and option sheets, and generic commands.
In some ways, such as its use of the Move, Copy, and Delete
functions, Star remains unsurpassed in the consistency
of its interface.
Other features, such as multilingual, multimedia
documents, have only recently appeared in other systems.
The following videotape was made in 1982 by two Star designers.
David Canfield Smith and Charles Irby.
It illustrates some of the innovations
in computer human interfaces embodied in the Xerox Star.
I'm David Smith.
I'd like to introduce you to the Xerox 8010 Star Information
System.
This is a new computer designed for office professionals.
It consists of a processor, a large display screen,
a keyboard, and a pointing device, called the mouse.
Stars are normally connected together
by the ethernet local area network.
This not only allows Stars to communicate with one another,
but it also lets them share resources, such as file storage
and printers.
The mouse has a ball on the bottom
that rotates as the mouse slides across a flat surface.
This moves the cursor on the screen
in corresponding motions.
It has two buttons on top that can be
sensed under program control.
You can use these buttons to specify objects
and destinations for commands.
The keyboard consists of a standard typing
array, and three groups of function keys.
The left group contains the generic functions,
Delete, Copy, Move, and Show Properties.
These four are used throughout the system.
For example, you use the same function key, Move,
to move a character in text, a line in an illustration,
a fraction in an equation, or a document in the file you are.
The top group of keys consists of common text formatting
functions, making text bold, italic, underlined, super,
or subscripted, or in a larger or smaller font.
The right group of keys consists of miscellaneous functions
for getting online assistance, defining
and expanding abbreviations, stopping ongoing operations,
and others.
The display screen shows your working environment.
We call this the desktop.
It is an electronic analog for an office.
On the screens, are small pictures, or icons,
representing familiar office objects.
This turned black because I pointed to it with a mouse,
and clicked the mouse button.
We call this selecting the object.
Selected objects highlight in reverse video.
You can then operate on the selection with the Delete,
Copy, Move keys and other keys.
Let me select some of the other icons on the desktop.
This is a folder, a records file, a file drawer, 3270
and teletype terminals, printers,
and in and out mail baskets.
Using the Move key, you can arrange your desktop
in any way you like.
Move is the most powerful command in the system.
It replaces a large number of conventional computer commands,
which we will point out as we go along.
The Copy command is also a powerful one in Star.
It establishes a paradigm for creating.
In order to create a new document,
for example, you copy an existing one.
Typically, Star users construct blank documents
to act as form pad sources for new ones.
Making a copy of one of these blank documents
is like tearing a sheet off a pad of paper.
The ability of users to make their own form pads
is one example of the user tailored ability
built into the system.
The Show Properties command allows
you to display and change the properties of an object,
such as the name of an icon.
We will discuss properties later.
In addition to moving, copying, deleting,
and showing properties, you can open an icon
to see what's inside.
You do this by selecting the icon and pushing the Open key.
The enlarged form is called the window.
Every icon has its own window.
This is a document window, displaying
the contents of a document.
Filing is done by moving an icon into or out of a file drawer.
These electronic analogs of the drawers
in an office filing cabinet.
File drawers are physically stored on file service
connected to the ethernet.
These are local ones stored on file servers
in my building in Palo Alto.
These are stored on file servers in Los Angeles.
You can have as many or as few file drawers on your desktop
as you want, regardless of where they're stored,
you interact with them in the same way.
When you open a file drawer, it displays a filing window.
Each object stored in the file drawer
is represented by a miniature icon, a name,
and some other information.
The names need not be unique, or even present.
For example, there are two copies
of the document named in NCC Script.
The dates tell me which is the latest version.
Filing is accomplished by editing filing windows.
You can select an object with a mouse and move
or copy it out to the desktop.
This transfers the object from the file server
over the ethernet to the local disk attached to your Star
workstation.
You can also move it from the desktop into a file drawer,
or out of one file drawer and into another
for straight server to server transfers.
Moving deletes the object from its old location.
Copying leaves the original behind unchanged.
Similarly, there is no print command.
Printing is accomplished by moving an object to a printer
icon.
When you do this, a special window, called an option sheet,
automatically appears.
This is a dedicated form like environment
that is widely used in Star to supply arguments to commands,
or to show properties of objects.
Its virtue is that it makes all of the options visible.
You don't have to remember what they are.
In this case, you can specify the number of copies to print,
and whether you want the document repaginated
before it is printed.
Let's print this document, and then walk over
and pick up the output.
As you can see, the screen closely
approximates the appearance of a printed page.
Mail is delivered to in baskets.
When you open and in basket icon, a window appears,
which looks much like a filing window.
The fields in the window are mailing related.
The recipients of the mail, the date it was sent,
who it was from, and the name of the item.
Here is a piece of Japanese mail.
Notice that any Star document can be sent through the mail.
Dave has given you an overview of Star's simple methods
for dealing with fairly standard operations like, filing,
printing, and electronic mail.
These facilities are made simple because of Star's desktop
and associated icons.
My name is Charles Irby.
I would like now to focus more on the facility Star provides
for dealing with the contents of documents and record
processing.
On my desktop, I have a document named John's report open.
Like all icons, when they're open,
they occupy a portion of the screen, called the window.
And each window has a header with a title
along the top and a few commands,
usually, toward the left end of it.
Along the right edge of it, is a vertical scrolling mechanism,
and along the bottom, is a horizontal scrolling mechanism.
I'll do a little of that right now, just
slide the image sideways.
And then I'll put it back where it was.
The vertical scrolling mechanism allows
me to either change pages, or slide the image up and down.
What I'll do right now, is simply flip to the next page.
So this is page two of my document.
And notice there is a heading up at the top of the page,
and then a single column of text with a figure
in the middle of it, and then more text below it.
There's a little P up at the top of this, which lets
me go to the previous page.
So I'll simply do that, and go back
to the title page of this document, which
is the first page, and then back to the second page again.
So now, we're back where we were.
I can also slide the image up a little bit at a time,
as I'm doing right now.
And this allows me to see the boundaries between pages.
So for example, here's the bottom of page two.
And here's page twos' page number,
the boundary between the pages, the heading for page three.
And you'll notice at page three starts off in a two column
format, and there are mechanisms in Star
that allow you to change the number of columns on pages.
If I want to see all of page three,
then I simply click the little n again,
and I now see the two columns of page three.
And you notice that there's an equation right here
on the page.
And we'll come back and deal with that in a moment.
Let's just go on through the rest of the document.
This is page four.
It's just another two column page.
And this is page five, happens to have a bar chart
illustration over in the left column,
and a short right column.
In fact, what I would like to do right now,
is add some text to this document right here.
In Star when you click the mouse button over a character,
then what happens is it highlights
that particular character.
And you'll see I can do that, and there's several characters.
If I click a second time on the same place,
then it will select the word that contains that character.
And if I click a third time, it selects the sentence
that contains that word, and a fourth time
selects the entire paragraph that contains that sentence.
A paragraph is in fact what I want,
and so I'm simply going to hit the Copy key just as Dave was
doing earlier, and I'm going to copy it
into this upper document.
And I do that by simply hitting Copy key,
and selecting a paragraph in the upper document
that I want it to follow.
And the new paragraph will appear here.
Now, you notice whereas in the old document
this paragraph occupied a single wide column, since this
is a two column page, it's automatically
adjusted to be as narrow as it needs
to be to fit into this column.
But it hasn't picked up the interline spacing
of these other paragraphs.
There's a key on the keyboard labeled, Same.
And by simply pushing that, and pointing
to one of the paragraphs, I'd like
it to be the same as, then it simply changes
the format of this paragraph.
OK.
So now it's double spaced, and all just as the other paragraph
was.
This is basically an optimization form
a general mechanism called a property sheet.
And if you notice down in the right hand corner of the screen
now, this property sheet for this paragraph is appearing.
This is a little window that lets
me set the various parameters of a paragraph.
So in fact, I can make it left flushed centered or right
flushed.
Or I can make it justified.
And this one is currently justified.
And that's indicated by a black highlighting.
And then I can set indentations from the left and right margin.
Let's actually change that now.
And let's bring it in say, three spaces from the left,
and let's say three spaces from the right.
And I can also change the spacing.
So let's make it one and a half line spacing.
And then let's also change the character properties.
And switching to the character properties,
it's actually going to perform the indenting.
So now, this is indented from where it was.
And now, down here are the character properties
that I can specify for the characters that
make up that paragraph.
First of all, you'll notice that there
are a number of different type styles that I can pick.
And for each type style, there's a size that I can pick.
So if for example, I change to this type size,
then those are the sizes I can use.
If I pick that one, in fact, only 10 and 12 are available.
So let's go back to the modern style that was in,
and make it be 14 point.
These are what are called mutually exclusive choice
parameters.
If I pick one, the current choice gets turned off.
These down here are called state parameters.
They're independent.
So I can have it be bold and italic both, or even
bold and italic and strikeout.
So let's take a look at how this appears now.
So the text now, is in '14 point, bold,
and it's also got what we call strike out, in other words,
a line through the middle of it.
Now, text editing works just the same,
as the move and copy paradigm that Dave
was showing you before.
I simply select, for example, a word,
and say Move, and point to a new place.
And it moves that word down here.
Or I might say, Copy, and select another word,
and it puts a copy of that word there.
I can point at any place and start typing,
and it simply goes in place, and the paragraph
stays justified as I type.
This equation already partially exists, and what I'll do
is add another term to it.
And what I'm going to do to do that,
is to use what we call a virtual keyboard, which
I'm going to cause to appear down
at the bottom of the screen.
A virtual keyboard is basically a way
of redefining the meaning of each of the keys
on the main typing array of the keyboard.
And right now, it's set to the English mode.
And if I change it by pushing another key on a keyboard,
then it takes on the meaning of the equation.
So those are different symbols that I can put into equations,
or some different mathematical symbols that I can use,
or some logic symbols that I can use,
or Greek characters, or some general purpose office symbols.
I can also say, set it to French, or German, or Spanish,
or Italian.
Or in general, all of the accented characters
on the European keyboards.
Let's go back now and do an equation.
So what I'd like to do is simply add a new term
to this equation.
So let's say subtract another term, which will be a fraction.
So I'm going to use this virtual keyboard to pick up a fraction.
And in the numerator, I'm going to put a sum,
let's say from i equals one to n.
And within that, let's put a subscripted figure.
So again, I'm going to go to use the special keyboard,
and I'm going to use a subscript in character,
and the subscripted character I'll make the a Greek lambda.