Xerox Star User Interface: An overview
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited as the primary historical demo of the Star UI whenever its influence on the Mac and Lisa or document-centric design is discussed.
What it is
A 1982 Xerox PARC film, presented at CHI '90, in which Star designers David Canfield Smith and Charles Irby give an overview of the Xerox Star interface. It shows the document-centric, icon-and-window office system.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2022 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Cites GeekyBear · 2022-06 · on “Xerox Star Keyboard”
A film from Xerox demonstrating the Xerox Star UI from back in the day: [this video] The Star was around $50,000 per additional workstation in today's dollars, although the 'starter kit' with a workstation, file/print/mail server, and laser printer that you had to purchase first ran around $240,000 in today's dollars.
Cites GeekyBear · 2023-05 · on “Xerox Star 8010 Interfaces, high quality polaroids (1981)”
Here's video of Xerox personel demonstrating the Star 8010 UI back in the day. [this video] Also, a more recent look at both the Star 8010 and the Apple Lisa. [LINK]
Cites lispm · 2023-07 · on “The Xerox Smalltalk-80 GUI Was Weird”
> The Xerox Smalltalk-80 GUI Was Weird "Weird" means only that you haven't used other similar UIs. Smalltalk 80 was a development environment. There were applications written in it with more extensive UI examples. > At first glance, this looks incredibly similar to something like the desktop of the Apple Lisa or early Mac OS. Not at all. But the Smalltalk 80 UI was only one of several that were developed. It would be better to compare the Mac OS UI to the office system from Xerox. > The first thing is that the Smalltalk environment wasn't really an operating system the same way something like Mac OS was. It’s more like an IDE that runs on bare hardware. The Mac hadn't also much of an OS. It
Cites bane · 2024-08 · on “Stapler: I remade a 32 year old classic Macintosh app”
The history of Operating System development is really interesting in that the decisions of what the atomic element of the system are (files, documents, or applications) lock all future development into a certain path, but all the choices not made then have to be somewhat retrofit into the design. For decades systems have dwelled in a kind of morass where they seem to focus on trying to implement different variants of the other two, with one of these atomic elements as the core concept. For example, the dominant atomic concept in Xerox Star was the document [1]. Documents are an abstraction just above files. A webpage is a document, but is made up of numerous files like the graphics, fonts, e
Cites leoc · 2025-08 · on “Living with an Apple Lisa [video]”
Here's a head-to-head video demonstration of the Lisa and the Xerox Star 8010: [LINK] And a dedicated video on the Star: [this video] .