Read more: “Tech before its time: Six gadgets too good, too soon“
Imagine trying to print a document in 1977. Are you at home? If so, forget it – your only hope of finding a printer is at work, where there might be a single dot-matrix device shared by the whole building. Sitting in front of your terminal, you will have to painstakingly key in complex lines of code to initiate printing and get the formatting you want. Don’t even think about generating pictures or different colours. Now you’re in for a long wait – with an output of less than 200 characters per second, the printer would have taken more than half a second just to print this sentence.
The company that released us from this torture was Xerox PARC, the Silicon Valley research incubator. Run by the company that pioneered photocopying, it also gave the world Ethernet networking and laser printers.
Advertisement
In 1977, drawing on its unofficial maxim “the best way to predict the future is to invent it”, Xerox PARC assembled the brightest graduates in the US to produce the Xerox 8010 Information System. Also dubbed the Xerox Star, it was like nothing anyone had ever seen. A 17-inch bitmapped display provided a window-based graphical user interface, pioneering the desktop metaphor we now take for granted. Alongside a keyboard, users could manipulate objects on the screen with something called a mouse. Ethernet connectivity brought with it file servers, networked printers and email, precisely the tools you needed to retrieve files and be freed of keying text into a command line. For printing, the system was a game-changer. This was the first high-powered desktop computer.
Apple’s delight
After more than four painstaking years of perfecting these features, the Xerox Star was launched in April 1981. “It was completely different and so much better than what had been before,” says , one of the system’s user-interface designers. “We believed we were changing the world.”
“We believed we were changing the world. That’s when Apple got interested”
That was when Apple got interested. “They were just gobsmacked,” recalls , then a software engineer at Xerox PARC. Steve Jobs turned “gobsmacked” into a profit, selling computers with software inspired by the Xerox Star for $2,500.
But despite the Star’s head start – it was two years ahead of the , three before the first , and four before – it failed. The Xerox Star’s innovations had made it prohibitively expensive: a single workstation cost at least $16,500, while a fully networked installation could set you back $75,000. “We couldn’t offer something both good and affordable,” Roberts says. “Xerox chose to offer something high-quality. Apple decided to go for the low end.”
Apple’s machines only had a third of the memory, their screens were half the size and they did not have hard drives at first, while the basic Xerox Star came with a luxurious 10 megabytes of disc space.
Unfortunately for Xerox, the company’s attorneys had been too busy during the development of the Star to patent any of the hardware, and in the early 1980s software patents were such a nascent field that nobody thought to protect the operating system, either. With the Star’s technology laid open for all to share, Apple eventually took the best parts and won out.
Without the Star, there would have been no convenient way to print from your desktop. Xerox cleared the path to the home office. Steve Jobs knew everyone would want their own Star, and thanks to Xerox, he had no difficulty in delivering their wish.