Such a travesty that XEROX PARC management was so clueless about what they had. They could have easily been the most signifigant and valued company in history.
So true! They made the most amazing hardware and software. They just didn't know how to market or sell it. But other companies like Apple and Microsoft had brilliant salespeople and engineers that knew how to make it better and sell like hotcakes!
Maybe, but not with the system as it was. It was much too expensive, and there was no market for it. Apple actually had the same problem with the Lisa, despite it being more than 5 times cheaper than the Xerox Star. So the Star was a revolutionary concept, but not economically viable for the existing market.
Love the video. There's so few videos showing how to actually use the Xerox Star. Let alone a Lisa next to a Star for direct comparisons. Just awesome. :-)
The interfaces may be "different enough to stand on their own", but it's obvious how deeply the influence of the Star's interface goes. It's fairer to say there would be no Lisa interface without the Star. The very definition of standing on the shoulders of giants.
Yes. Xerox made some fantastic innovations that were made successful by Apple, Microsoft and others. We are glad that you liked this video so much and your support for our organization. Please spread the word!
Following the question about a blitter, the camera person said “On the Lisa it would have been in ROM as part of the Toolbox.” The Lisa only really had a bootstrap ROM, it loaded everything off disk, unlike the Macintosh. The Alto, Star, Daybreak, etc. were similar, they had a bootstrap but most code was loaded from disk.
I have a Lisa 2/10. The machine takes a good five minutes or more to boot up. Very much loading a crap ton of stuff from the hard disk. As opposed to having things in ROM.
I started with Xerox in the early 80's. With the Xerox 8010, it was sold by the "office products division" which was a dedicated part of the Xerox salesforce OPD started with the 6xx and 8xx series of "storing typewriters" OPD got the 8010 because Xerox had no other way to sell it. (there was another division of Xerox called the Printing Sytems Division (PSD) which sold the laser printers large and ..well...larger. OPD people were trained in the Leesburg VA facility on the 8000 line but always had a very close tie into PARC. The target market was "document intensive businesses ("knowledge worker" and "The Document Company" was brought to you by a guy named Len Vickers) so Large Legal firms, Large Businesses such as GM, Ford, Boeing, etc) and just about anyone who needed a way to produce very pretty work in large volumes. A typical "local" network would have about 75 clients, some filer servers, printers, fax machines and of course email. When I joined my local office in the very early I could make a document and drop it on a printer at any xerox office around the world. (I could email it too, but that was pretty pedestrian)
Wow! Very cool! Thank you for sharing your experience! It's great to hear from someone who was there and working in that time period. Such a fascinating history that Xerox had with early computers.
@@vcfederation 8010 was pretty much my daily computer for probably 10 years. I remember in 86 or 87 visiting with a friend of mine who worked at a very large company and they were all excited that their new PC's would be on a "network" . My response was "you mean they're not now?"
As an 8th grader in Loudoun County our gifted and talented class spent a day at the XICTMD (Xerox International Center for Training and Management Development) in Leesburg basically going through a day of training on the Xerox Star system. It was my first experience with laser printers, email, graphical user interfaces, and Ethernet. It was a good day. The 10Mbps Ethernet was literally a single bright yellow coaxial cable going around the room near the ceiling. Computers connected to the physical shared bus with vampire taps with AUI cables to the workstations. It's easy to understand CSMA/CD when you see the shared cable going around the room.
I don’t know why everyone says that the first Macintosh was revolutionary because it had a mouse and graphical user interface even that stuff already existed way before the Macintosh was even an idea. That stuff existed on the Lisa, on Xerox machines, and in 1968.
It's because Apple via Steve Jobs created a myth like many others about Apple. This was perpetuated by a clever and very expensive marketing campaign that brought the Macintosh into mainstream consciousness. Hardly anyone knew about the mouse or a GUI before the Macintosh brought it to the general public's consciousness. I had no idea about Xerox and their research until I read a book about it about 10 years ago.
The 1984 Mac largely captures all of the standard GUI elements AND behaviour still in use today. The earlier GUI versions like these had not yet solidified the concepts. They show flashes of it here and there but still differ significantly as a whole from today's GUI.
At 30:40 someone asked whether it had “blitter circuitry,” which Jason wasn’t familiar with: A blitter implements BITBLT (bit block transfer) to offload work from the main CPU. Alto derivatives such as the Star used custom microcode to essentially implement a BITBLT instruction, and at least originally also implemented display list drawing-which they used instead of a frame buffer!-as a “microcode task” in that their microcode was multi-tasking in addition to writable.
Xerox IBM ATT would merge and would have interconnected world at least 10 years earlier than the present internet. Hey who knows maybe the Global Corporatists would have been the good guys not the evil and greedy predatory scum they are now.
Thank you for that fascinating video! My 18yr Xerox career began in '79 as a copier operator at their Mountainside, NJ XRC copy center. They had an Alto in the front office there and I was fascinated by it. My only tangible experience with computers up to that point was with dedicated word processing systems when I worked for Vydec Inc which of course were all text-driven. In a few years, I transferred to the Princeton sales office where I used the 8010 on a daily basis for creating and printing documents as well as email. Even though I was still involved in copier sales and support I continued to be very interested in office system products and networking. I recall seeing them used at Bristol Meyers-Squibb and at Princeton U. Eventually we were using and selling Viewpoint on Sun workstations as well as seeing them on PC hardware (experimental). During one of my classes in the Leesburg, Va training center they ushered us into a large room along with other students to hear a lecture from several PARC representatives (don't recall their names) who were talking about the future of communications. At one point, I remember one of them holding up a PC expansion card containing the Viewpoint OS and was going on about how Xerox was missing the boat by not supporting their efforts to further develop and market them. Not long afterward we were sent to Stamford to learn how to demonstrate and sell the "Documenter", which was a bundled standalone system of what was then called a 6085 workstation along with a 4045 laser printer. This was supposed to compete with the new Macs but they were way too expensive by comparison.
Thank you for sharing your story. It is always nice to hear from people that have actually used these machines in the original time period (when they were new) and how they were used in the field. We are glad that you enjoyed the video!
This is a wonderful video. I'm very familiar with the creation stories of the Xerox Alto, the Xerox Star, and the Apple Lisa, but I did not realize until now the extent to how different the interfaces of the Star and the Lisa are.
@nebaicita: Undoubtedly there was a lot copied, but other things that were "enhanced". Read the book "Dealer's of Lightening" to see the details of how they got a deep look at the Xerox Alto.
I was stationed at the Air Force Station in Sunnyvale. I purchased two Stars so we would be compatible with NASA. I became friends with the managers at the Xerox lab in Silicone Valley. And yes, Apple was shown the Star and then developed the Lisa. Our staffed loved the Star. Another office bought the Lisa. They were envious of our office.
You are very welcome! Come visit our museum in Wall, NJ. Lots of different computers on display. Part of our mission is educating the public on the history of computers. How did we get from the ENIAC to that smartphone in your hand?
Note: That Lisa is the Lisa 2, which used 3.5" drives like the Macintosh, rather than the 5.25" Twiggy-drives. The Macintosh was originally supposed to have Twiggy-drives, but that was changed due to reliability and data density. The Lisa 2 would evolve into the Macintosh XL, which was a 2/10 modified to run and develop Macintosh software
Yeah supposedly the Lisa 1 is much rarer and harder to find than the Lisa 2, as Apple offered user free upgrade to Lisa 1 owners, which I believed only changed the original Twiggy drive with a Sony single-sided 3.5 inch drive. They made decision after seeing how reliable the drive, at least compared to the Twiggy was was notoriously unreliable, was after using it in the first Mac.
What an interesting video. I never saw the Xerox Star, and comparaison is astonishing. Xerox had a diamond in hands, but Apple really transformed it in a so beautiful, so fascinating and useful computer. When the Lisa came, the Xerox Star became dinosaur... I'm looking for a Lisa 2 for years to repair it. Never had a Lisa in hands, except when I was a young child (about 2) and the one of my father was already not working anymore. But, unfortunately, the rare ones I find to sell are so expensive (at least two thousand euros for the non-working central until, no keyboard, no mouse...) that it is crazy...
Yeah. It is hard to find one of these at a reasonable price. Perhaps someone will make a clone of this machine? Look for Jason's next video coming out this Sat. Nov. 11 at 6:30PM EST! th-cam.com/video/_pWRVR1Knfo/w-d-xo.html
Back in the 1980s I worked with both the Xerox 8010, and the 6085 for about 6 years total. There was a next program loaded onto them called Versatec EXPERT (Drafting), part of their Engineering CAD software that also had PC board design. I cannot seem to find much information on, but for it time, was really powerful. Even to the point where you could load a picture into a drawing in order to trace it. I would have to reboot the computer to switch between Viewpoint and EXPERT CAD. It seems like I remember there was either GUI improvements, or we had all of the options for such things as similar to todays Copy, Paste, and also Drag and Drop functionality. Also, the 6085 went to one of the first optical mouse - Though needed a specific patterned 8" X 7" Aluminum grid pad. You have brought back SO many memories (and nightmares)..........LOL Interesting the keyboard you have the for the 8010 I've never seen before. Seems like a transition model from the original "clunky" 8010, and the modern "sleek" 6085 keyboard. PS - I hope you never get the dreaded system crash error code of 915, or 935. Sometimes a full system reload was needed.
@@vcfederation An additional tidbit. A US Government Agency had a few hundred of these systems (8010 & 6025) at sites around the world running the Versatec Expert CAD Drafting program, and under contracts, Xerox had to keep these running until the mid/late 1990s until the switchover the PC/Windows machines. Again, I cannot thank you enough for this!!!!! 😃
Yes. There are many situations throughout computer history where a company makes a superior product, but just does a terrible job of marketing and selling it.
I was shown an Alto running Interlisp at PARC by my friend John Seely Brown back around 1978. It has been a long time, but I don't remember the user interface being as clunky as on the Star demonstrated here. John had an AI group consisting of Alan Bell and Dick Burton and others at the time, so they had internal access to Altos, and later the Dorados, which had microcode implementing Interlisp very efficiently. I was very impressed with the lisp interface, the memory-mapped raster display, and the networked interconnections with other computers running Lisp implementations around the country, notably a lot of PDP10s at the time. Having seen this, I built a memory-mapped display computer based on a pre-production Motorola 68000 I got from Tom Gunter at Motorola, which turned out to be very much like the Macintosh circuitry, when Apple released it a couple of years later, and much cheaper to build than the bit-slice ECL CPUs used in the Dorado.
Nice. Right... the xerox as well as other workstations from that time were built upon a bit-slice approach (bit silicing). You can arrange a series of ALUs of n bits (often 4) in order to create a custom ISA or even a known one out of microcode. The most popular were the AMD 29xxx series. For example, some early Apollo WS were created with a 68010 ISA made out of bit slices, or the early SGI geometry engine.
Good work demonstrating these rare pioneering systems which played such an important role in the development of the idioms of our modern digital culture. Suggestion: Invest in some tie-clip microphones if you can.
Thank you for your kind comments. Yes, this was our first virtual show, so it was a make shift event. We have learned a lot from that event and are getting better every year!
It took 2 years to transfer the idea GUI from xerox star to Apple Lisa and 1 more year to build the Apple Macintosh. 40 years later we still have a keyboard and a mouse on the desktop and programming is the same as ever. I believe the work to use icons and graphic displays was important but we use only letters and operation characters to write code to let the machine „live“ and work for us. It’s time to think new and make the next great step. today the machines are bigger (more RAM/ROM/Flash/Drives) and much faster the displays are better but the way to use machines and writing programs on it are the same as it was in 1981. my question when will follow the next great step after 40 years?
Xerox Star has AMD's Am2900. Star workstation hardware was known as a Dandelion. The performance of the Dandelion machine, which sold for $20,000, was about 850 in the Dhrystone benchmark. 68000 @ 8Mhz has 2,100 Dhrystones.
@@vcfederation I bypasses the whole windows 9x ecosystem with OS/2 and then win2k onward for my Video Toaster NT box.. then later just went mac and haven't looked back! - Now with the DUMB privacy land mind that is MS… i only keep a PC for 3d rendering / VR games which i use the PC as an octane render slave / streaming VR to quest / Apple Vision pro for PCVR stuff. The PC is headless with just an hdmi dongle and i remote in via ipad on the wall
10 mins into the video and I am thinking that Xerox was still stuck in the mindset that the keyboard was still the most important input device. It seems that the best thing Apple did was to shift that focus to the mouse, and work out all the paradigms needed to do so.
I bought one of those for $300 at an auction years ago. It turned on and worked when I inspected it before buying it, but then it broke the instant I turned it on when I got it home. I still have it, but it’s still broken.
You got it at a nice price! Depending on where you are, we can suggest a local vintage computer community that can help you repair it. Send an email to repairworkshops@vcfed.org for info.
nowadays the kids say, "You mean you play that box of magnetic ribbon thing and some video will come out? Is that some kind of stone age magic?"@@vcfederation
I would be wonderful if the Lisa could be embodied in FPGA so it could be preserved rather than emulated. The Xerox even more so but from the user perspective so dependant on they keyboard.
These are two of my most favorite systems. I used to work with a Xerox 6085 which is the last of the star line of D machines, specifically it was called the Daybreak.
What do you think why Xerox don't recognize the Apple Lisa and the step forward Windows system and not understand that this is a usable solution for the Economic companies? Thank you weakbit
Xerox continued to sell their windowing system - Viewpoint, then GlobalView, for years after the Lisa was dead and buried (literally!) I think the last version shipped in 1996?
Sounds like a perfect project for an emulator either in software or even an FPGA hardware, I bet you could get an emulator to run on an Rasberry Pi board
I heard the Xerox machine cost something like $16k. I wonder if they could have made a commercial version for under $2k? Also, that monitor was massive compared to most computers of the very early 80's.
Ah so it was under $5k. Not bad but being released in 1985 it was too late and still too expensive. It's a pity. But then again, if they were such a poor organisation in terms of commercial vision then it was probably better that dynamic companies such as Apple and Microsoft drove the technology forward.@@vcfederation
Oh yeah, Apple ripped off Xerox and then improved upon it. No doubt about that. There is no way Jobs or Woz would of jumped from the Apple II ideology and ecosystem... to that. Unless they had seen it elsewhere and pilfered the whole idea. If you look at Commodore you see something similar. Look how much the VIC-20/C64 sytling looks to the TRS-80 Model 1. Oh yeah, total rip off. There is no way the PET could of gone from looking like a PET... to suddenly the microPET looking like... a TRS-80 Model 1. As a Mac SE and Performa 476 owner, I got a guy gave me a tour of a Lisa he had for sale, but he was asking way too much for something that by that time... was absolute junk. I think he wanted $3800 for it. By that time, it was so glacially slow compared to current tech, it was nothing more than an antique curio even then.
Thanks for sharing! We agree that many others copied and improved upon others. Apple certainly knew what to do with superior technology with superior marketing.
For USD 5k, you can get a very good ROG system with colored LCD. You should OVER CLOCK everything to make your USD 5k worth while. If it breaks, then seek litigation against XEROX because this is clearly a rip off
"Apple Lisa - by Steve Jobs"... Lol, surely not. Or would you say "The Commodore 64 - by Jack Tramiel"? Or "Microsoft Word - by Bill Gates"? Damn, that guy Steve Jobs was crazy about computers and technology, but he was just a very talented CEO who didn't have much of an idea about the internals and how these machines actually worked.
Blame Jack Tramiel for not evolving the MOS/CSG 65xx CPU family in line with the competition like Intel's 286. Acorn Computers funded ARM to replace the uncompetitive MOS/CSG 65xx CPU family. Major micro-computer companies that used the 65xx CPU family have transitioned to Motorola's 68000.
@bierundkippen720: Well Steve Jobs *did* run the project for a while before getting kicked off, but yes, it was a team project, not just one individual.
We do our best with the volunteers that we have available. If you want to improve our camera operation, please donate so that we can hire a professional: vcfed.org/donate/
Such a travesty that XEROX PARC management was so clueless about what they had. They could have easily been the most signifigant and valued company in history.
Xerox PARC management knew what they had invented. Xerox head office (on the other side of the country) were the copier heads.
So true! They made the most amazing hardware and software. They just didn't know how to market or sell it. But other companies like Apple and Microsoft had brilliant salespeople and engineers that knew how to make it better and sell like hotcakes!
It seems to be the same problem that Commodore had. Great products and engineers, but terrible management and marketers.
In a parallel Universe they are.
Maybe, but not with the system as it was. It was much too expensive, and there was no market for it. Apple actually had the same problem with the Lisa, despite it being more than 5 times cheaper than the Xerox Star. So the Star was a revolutionary concept, but not economically viable for the existing market.
Mind blowing that I learned about this years later thanks to TH-cam after having my first PC in 1992. That's over a full decade later.
@omegaman1409: We're glad that you enjoyed our video!
Love the video. There's so few videos showing how to actually use the Xerox Star. Let alone a Lisa next to a Star for direct comparisons. Just awesome. :-)
Jason did a good job with this video. It's great to see such rare machines being explained and demonstrated.
@@vcfederation Thanks for the compliment!
The interfaces may be "different enough to stand on their own", but it's obvious how deeply the influence of the Star's interface goes. It's fairer to say there would be no Lisa interface without the Star. The very definition of standing on the shoulders of giants.
Yes. Xerox made some fantastic innovations that were made successful by Apple, Microsoft and others. We are glad that you liked this video so much and your support for our organization. Please spread the word!
Yup - that's what I was trying to show with this demonstration.
Following the question about a blitter, the camera person said “On the Lisa it would have been in ROM as part of the Toolbox.” The Lisa only really had a bootstrap ROM, it loaded everything off disk, unlike the Macintosh. The Alto, Star, Daybreak, etc. were similar, they had a bootstrap but most code was loaded from disk.
I have a Lisa 2/10. The machine takes a good five minutes or more to boot up. Very much loading a crap ton of stuff from the hard disk. As opposed to having things in ROM.
@cmhenator: Thanks for the info!
@GaryCameron780: Yes. It takes forever to load!
I started with Xerox in the early 80's. With the Xerox 8010, it was sold by the "office products division" which was a dedicated part of the Xerox salesforce OPD started with the 6xx and 8xx series of "storing typewriters" OPD got the 8010 because Xerox had no other way to sell it. (there was another division of Xerox called the Printing Sytems Division (PSD) which sold the laser printers large and ..well...larger. OPD people were trained in the Leesburg VA facility on the 8000 line but always had a very close tie into PARC. The target market was "document intensive businesses ("knowledge worker" and "The Document Company" was brought to you by a guy named Len Vickers) so Large Legal firms, Large Businesses such as GM, Ford, Boeing, etc) and just about anyone who needed a way to produce very pretty work in large volumes. A typical "local" network would have about 75 clients, some filer servers, printers, fax machines and of course email. When I joined my local office in the very early I could make a document and drop it on a printer at any xerox office around the world. (I could email it too, but that was pretty pedestrian)
Wow! Very cool! Thank you for sharing your experience! It's great to hear from someone who was there and working in that time period. Such a fascinating history that Xerox had with early computers.
@@vcfederation 8010 was pretty much my daily computer for probably 10 years. I remember in 86 or 87 visiting with a friend of mine who worked at a very large company and they were all excited that their new PC's would be on a "network" . My response was "you mean they're not now?"
As an 8th grader in Loudoun County our gifted and talented class spent a day at the XICTMD (Xerox International Center for Training and Management Development) in Leesburg basically going through a day of training on the Xerox Star system. It was my first experience with laser printers, email, graphical user interfaces, and Ethernet. It was a good day.
The 10Mbps Ethernet was literally a single bright yellow coaxial cable going around the room near the ceiling. Computers connected to the physical shared bus with vampire taps with AUI cables to the workstations. It's easy to understand CSMA/CD when you see the shared cable going around the room.
I don’t know why everyone says that the first Macintosh was revolutionary because it had a mouse and graphical user interface even that stuff already existed way before the Macintosh was even an idea. That stuff existed on the Lisa, on Xerox machines, and in 1968.
It's because Apple via Steve Jobs created a myth like many others about Apple. This was perpetuated by a clever and very expensive marketing campaign that brought the Macintosh into mainstream consciousness. Hardly anyone knew about the mouse or a GUI before the Macintosh brought it to the general public's consciousness. I had no idea about Xerox and their research until I read a book about it about 10 years ago.
The 1984 Mac largely captures all of the standard GUI elements AND behaviour still in use today. The earlier GUI versions like these had not yet solidified the concepts. They show flashes of it here and there but still differ significantly as a whole from today's GUI.
At 30:40 someone asked whether it had “blitter circuitry,” which Jason wasn’t familiar with: A blitter implements BITBLT (bit block transfer) to offload work from the main CPU. Alto derivatives such as the Star used custom microcode to essentially implement a BITBLT instruction, and at least originally also implemented display list drawing-which they used instead of a frame buffer!-as a “microcode task” in that their microcode was multi-tasking in addition to writable.
Xerox IBM ATT would merge and would have interconnected world at least 10 years earlier than the present internet. Hey who knows maybe the Global Corporatists would have been the good guys not the evil and greedy predatory scum they are now.
@cmhenator: Thanks for the info!
Thank you for that fascinating video! My 18yr Xerox career began in '79 as a copier operator at their Mountainside, NJ XRC copy center. They had an Alto in the front office there and I was fascinated by it. My only tangible experience with computers up to that point was with dedicated word processing systems when I worked for Vydec Inc which of course were all text-driven. In a few years, I transferred to the Princeton sales office where I used the 8010 on a daily basis for creating and printing documents as well as email. Even though I was still involved in copier sales and support I continued to be very interested in office system products and networking. I recall seeing them used at Bristol Meyers-Squibb and at Princeton U. Eventually we were using and selling Viewpoint on Sun workstations as well as seeing them on PC hardware (experimental). During one of my classes in the Leesburg, Va training center they ushered us into a large room along with other students to hear a lecture from several PARC representatives (don't recall their names) who were talking about the future of communications. At one point, I remember one of them holding up a PC expansion card containing the Viewpoint OS and was going on about how Xerox was missing the boat by not supporting their efforts to further develop and market them. Not long afterward we were sent to Stamford to learn how to demonstrate and sell the "Documenter", which was a bundled standalone system of what was then called a 6085 workstation along with a 4045 laser printer. This was supposed to compete with the new Macs but they were way too expensive by comparison.
Thank you for sharing your story. It is always nice to hear from people that have actually used these machines in the original time period (when they were new) and how they were used in the field. We are glad that you enjoyed the video!
This is a wonderful video. I'm very familiar with the creation stories of the Xerox Alto, the Xerox Star, and the Apple Lisa, but I did not realize until now the extent to how different the interfaces of the Star and the Lisa are.
Thanks! That’s what I was trying to show, that the Lisa UI is not a “copy paste” of the Star!
Its a copy of xerox alto computer ..wozniak take 8 chips out from the original desing
@mmcthrow: Yes. It's pretty amazing!
@compu85: Thanks for answering!
@nebaicita: Undoubtedly there was a lot copied, but other things that were "enhanced". Read the book "Dealer's of Lightening" to see the details of how they got a deep look at the Xerox Alto.
I was stationed at the Air Force Station in Sunnyvale. I purchased two Stars so we would be compatible with NASA. I became friends with the managers at the Xerox lab in Silicone Valley. And yes, Apple was shown the Star and then developed the Lisa. Our staffed loved the Star. Another office bought the Lisa. They were envious of our office.
Very cool! Thank you for sharing your story!
thank you for keeping up these old computers up and running that started the internet.
You are very welcome! Come visit our museum in Wall, NJ. Lots of different computers on display. Part of our mission is educating the public on the history of computers. How did we get from the ENIAC to that smartphone in your hand?
Note: That Lisa is the Lisa 2, which used 3.5" drives like the Macintosh, rather than the 5.25" Twiggy-drives. The Macintosh was originally supposed to have Twiggy-drives, but that was changed due to reliability and data density. The Lisa 2 would evolve into the Macintosh XL, which was a 2/10 modified to run and develop Macintosh software
The Lisa 2/10 and Macintosh XL are identical, the only difference was the software included with the machine.
Also specifically, the Lisa in this video is a Lisa 2/5 (with a more modern hard disk mounted in the empty spot in the drive cage).
Yeah supposedly the Lisa 1 is much rarer and harder to find than the Lisa 2, as Apple offered user free upgrade to Lisa 1 owners, which I believed only changed the original Twiggy drive with a Sony single-sided 3.5 inch drive. They made decision after seeing how reliable the drive, at least compared to the Twiggy was was notoriously unreliable, was after using it in the first Mac.
What an interesting video. I never saw the Xerox Star, and comparaison is astonishing. Xerox had a diamond in hands, but Apple really transformed it in a so beautiful, so fascinating and useful computer. When the Lisa came, the Xerox Star became dinosaur...
I'm looking for a Lisa 2 for years to repair it. Never had a Lisa in hands, except when I was a young child (about 2) and the one of my father was already not working anymore. But, unfortunately, the rare ones I find to sell are so expensive (at least two thousand euros for the non-working central until, no keyboard, no mouse...) that it is crazy...
Yeah. It is hard to find one of these at a reasonable price. Perhaps someone will make a clone of this machine? Look for Jason's next video coming out this Sat. Nov. 11 at 6:30PM EST! th-cam.com/video/_pWRVR1Knfo/w-d-xo.html
Great work and share! Thanks!
Glad that you liked it!
Back in the 1980s I worked with both the Xerox 8010, and the 6085 for about 6 years total. There was a next program loaded onto them called Versatec EXPERT (Drafting), part of their Engineering CAD software that also had PC board design. I cannot seem to find much information on, but for it time, was really powerful. Even to the point where you could load a picture into a drawing in order to trace it. I would have to reboot the computer to switch between Viewpoint and EXPERT CAD.
It seems like I remember there was either GUI improvements, or we had all of the options for such things as similar to todays Copy, Paste, and also Drag and Drop functionality. Also, the 6085 went to one of the first optical mouse - Though needed a specific patterned 8" X 7" Aluminum grid pad.
You have brought back SO many memories (and nightmares)..........LOL Interesting the keyboard you have the for the 8010 I've never seen before. Seems like a transition model from the original "clunky" 8010, and the modern "sleek" 6085 keyboard.
PS - I hope you never get the dreaded system crash error code of 915, or 935. Sometimes a full system reload was needed.
We are so glad that you enjoyed the video! Thanks for sharing your experiences!
@@vcfederation An additional tidbit. A US Government Agency had a few hundred of these systems (8010 & 6025) at sites around the world running the Versatec Expert CAD Drafting program, and under contracts, Xerox had to keep these running until the mid/late 1990s until the switchover the PC/Windows machines. Again, I cannot thank you enough for this!!!!! 😃
"Wastebasket" also sounds superior to "Recycle bin"
@mr.soundguy968: We agree!
Mind blowing that this tech was available when most computers were using DOS
Yes. There are many situations throughout computer history where a company makes a superior product, but just does a terrible job of marketing and selling it.
@@csuporj 286/386 PC has MS/SCO Xenix, AT&T license Unix.
Intel 286 comes with a standardized MMU to enable Xenix 286. All PCs with 286 CPUs can run Xenix 286.
I love old technology.
Yes. These machines are original and fun to work with.
Apple also paid Xerox 1 million to license some of the ideas behind it. So, not stolen in any way.
Xerox also got some amount of pre-IPO Apple stock for the right to use whatever SJ & crew saw.
@@cmhenator Yup. Yet another reason the argument that Apple stole everything from Xerox is wrong.
That's probably why Xerox sued Apple in 1990 ?
@mglmouser: In any case Apple didn't start from scratch with completely original ideas. They used a lot from Xerox.
@cmhenator: They got a early look and a look at the code of the Alto.
I was shown an Alto running Interlisp at PARC by my friend John Seely Brown back around 1978. It has been a long time, but I don't remember the user interface being as clunky as on the Star demonstrated here. John had an AI group consisting of Alan Bell and Dick Burton and others at the time, so they had internal access to Altos, and later the Dorados, which had microcode implementing Interlisp very efficiently. I was very impressed with the lisp interface, the memory-mapped raster display, and the networked interconnections with other computers running Lisp implementations around the country, notably a lot of PDP10s at the time. Having seen this, I built a memory-mapped display computer based on a pre-production Motorola 68000 I got from Tom Gunter at Motorola, which turned out to be very much like the Macintosh circuitry, when Apple released it a couple of years later, and much cheaper to build than the bit-slice ECL CPUs used in the Dorado.
Wow! Great story. Thanks for sharing! :-D
Nice. Right... the xerox as well as other workstations from that time were built upon a bit-slice approach (bit silicing). You can arrange a series of ALUs of n bits (often 4) in order to create a custom ISA or even a known one out of microcode. The most popular were the AMD 29xxx series. For example, some early Apollo WS were created with a 68010 ISA made out of bit slices, or the early SGI geometry engine.
@paco3447: Thanks for adding info to the conversation!
Good work demonstrating these rare pioneering systems which played such an important role in the development of the idioms of our modern digital culture.
Suggestion: Invest in some tie-clip microphones if you can.
Thank you for your kind comments. Yes, this was our first virtual show, so it was a make shift event. We have learned a lot from that event and are getting better every year!
Thanks!
It took 2 years to transfer the idea GUI from xerox star to Apple Lisa and 1 more year to build the Apple Macintosh. 40 years later we still have a keyboard and a mouse on the desktop and programming is the same as ever. I believe the work to use icons and graphic displays was important but we use only letters and operation characters to write code to let the machine „live“ and work for us. It’s time to think new and make the next great step. today the machines are bigger (more RAM/ROM/Flash/Drives) and much faster the displays are better but the way to use machines and writing programs on it are the same as it was in 1981. my question when will follow the next great step after 40 years?
Interesting idea. I'm sure there are many ways programmers could step up their game come out with the next great breakthrough!
Xerox also built a Time Machine but didn’t see the commercial appeal.
LOL! Yeah. That was definitely the mentality!
Xerox Star has AMD's Am2900. Star workstation hardware was known as a Dandelion. The performance of the Dandelion machine, which sold for $20,000, was about 850 in the Dhrystone benchmark.
68000 @ 8Mhz has 2,100 Dhrystones.
Interesting. Thanks for sharing!
Document centric was also a feature on os/2 same post-it note setup
@cjadams7434: So true!
@@vcfederation I bypasses the whole windows 9x ecosystem with OS/2 and then win2k onward for my Video Toaster NT box.. then later just went mac and haven't looked back! - Now with the DUMB privacy land mind that is MS… i only keep a PC for 3d rendering / VR games which i use the PC as an octane render slave / streaming VR to quest / Apple Vision pro for PCVR stuff. The PC is headless with just an hdmi dongle and i remote in via ipad on the wall
wow!! love this ... funny to see how archaic the original gui is lol
Glad that you liked the video! :-D
10 mins into the video and I am thinking that Xerox was still stuck in the mindset that the keyboard was still the most important input device. It seems that the best thing Apple did was to shift that focus to the mouse, and work out all the paradigms needed to do so.
Interesting thought.
Great job!
Thanks!
Jason did a great job with the talk!
:)
The size of that beauty. I wonder how many hundreds of times faster my watch is.
As the tortoise proved, speed isn't as important as winning the race ... Besides it is historically important and was innovative in its time.
The Xerox Star was only $16 k per machine.
I bought one of those for $300 at an auction years ago. It turned on and worked when I inspected it before buying it, but then it broke the instant I turned it on when I got it home. I still have it, but it’s still broken.
You got it at a nice price! Depending on where you are, we can suggest a local vintage computer community that can help you repair it. Send an email to repairworkshops@vcfed.org for info.
I have only used a 5 inch floppy, not the 8 inch. I must be TOO YOUNG.
Don't feel bad. Not all of us even knew about 8in floppies until they joined other hobbyists like this!
nowadays the kids say, "You mean you play that box of magnetic ribbon thing and some video will come out? Is that some kind of stone age magic?"@@vcfederation
IF YOU DO THIS WE LOVE YOU FOREVER
Such a great video.
I would be wonderful if the Lisa could be embodied in FPGA so it could be preserved rather than emulated. The Xerox even more so but from the user perspective so dependant on they keyboard.
Yes. It would be nice to emulator it in a way that matches the original as close as possible. Original machines are rare, expensive and hard to fix.
its insane how good and cheap computers have become.
Truly!
When I heard "we're not licensed for bold" my thought was maybe bold is a monthly subscription like heated seats in some of the newer vehicles. :)
LOL! Yeah it's crazy how everything is a subscription model these days!
I don't know how Xerox handled "product factoring" but some keys were very much time based...
These are two of my most favorite systems. I used to work with a Xerox 6085 which is the last of the star line of D machines, specifically it was called the Daybreak.
We agree that they are pretty cool systems!
Thanks for sharing.
You are very welcome. We are glad that you liked this video so much and your support for our organization. Please spread the word!
What do you think why Xerox don't recognize the Apple Lisa and the step forward Windows system and not understand that this is a usable solution for the Economic companies? Thank you weakbit
I'm not sure I understand. Can you rephrase that?
@@vcfederation I mean Xerox fail in there prediction for the usability of a Windows based system - this is what it means. Thank you weakbit
Xerox continued to sell their windowing system - Viewpoint, then GlobalView, for years after the Lisa was dead and buried (literally!) I think the last version shipped in 1996?
Sounds like a perfect project for an emulator either in software or even an FPGA hardware, I bet you could get an emulator to run on an Rasberry Pi board
@johnjakson444: I'm sure that someone could make an emulator!
Jason Perkins looks like me, that's crazy!
Some people say that I used to look like Tom Hanks. It happens!
@@vcfederation I guess. Are you the guy in the video? I don't see Tom Hanks there.
I'd give my opinion, but you don't have any videos on your channel :) -Jason
@@compu85 haha thanks bro. I have to get around to it.
Should be noted in the description that Star is from 1981, and Lisa 2 is from 1984. Quite a long time for that computer booming age.
Yeah, progress moved pretty quickly back then!
The Lisa was introduced in 1983. Both systems are running an updated version of their OS, which makes them faster than the software at launch.
I heard the Xerox machine cost something like $16k.
I wonder if they could have made a commercial version for under $2k?
Also, that monitor was massive compared to most computers of the very early 80's.
That was the commercial version. The cheapification is the DayBreak. Yeah. It was massive.
Ah so it was under $5k. Not bad but being released in 1985 it was too late and still too expensive. It's a pity. But then again, if they were such a poor organisation in terms of commercial vision then it was probably better that dynamic companies such as Apple and Microsoft drove the technology forward.@@vcfederation
Yes I can buy searched catalog items.
Awesome!
Excuse me, could you please inform which brand company was the first to use the ring topology and how it was before using the MSU, please help me
Oh yeah, Apple ripped off Xerox and then improved upon it.
No doubt about that.
There is no way Jobs or Woz would of jumped from the Apple II ideology and ecosystem... to that. Unless they had seen it elsewhere and pilfered the whole idea.
If you look at Commodore you see something similar. Look how much the VIC-20/C64 sytling looks to the TRS-80 Model 1. Oh yeah, total rip off. There is no way the PET could of gone from looking like a PET... to suddenly the microPET looking like... a TRS-80 Model 1.
As a Mac SE and Performa 476 owner, I got a guy gave me a tour of a Lisa he had for sale, but he was asking way too much for something that by that time... was absolute junk. I think he wanted $3800 for it. By that time, it was so glacially slow compared to current tech, it was nothing more than an antique curio even then.
Thanks for sharing! We agree that many others copied and improved upon others. Apple certainly knew what to do with superior technology with superior marketing.
0:39 Steve Jobs wouldn't even know how to program a 7-segment display. lol. A 'Nickel & Dime' kinda 'guy'. 😊 🖋
@Jdvc-yd5tx: Yeah. He was a salesperson more than a programmer.
Why is the date not set correctly on both of these? Are both not Y2K compliant?
The Lisa clock can't be set past 1997.
Nope they aren’t Y2K compliant.
@Hiphopasaurus: The Lisa clock can't be set past 1997.
@Johnwick-5903.5: Thanks answering that! :-D
20:24, I have one of those little network translator boxes and I don't know what to do with it, if you need it I could send it to you
Good news is those AUI adapters are common. If you want to send it to our museum in NJ, USA we'd be happy to have it.
Looks like they are common enough that he doesn't need one.
Very nice
Yes. Jason did a very good talk.
For USD 5k, you can get a very good ROG system with colored LCD. You should OVER CLOCK everything to make your USD 5k worth while. If it breaks, then seek litigation against XEROX because this is clearly a rip off
Interesting.
"Apple Lisa - by Steve Jobs"...
Lol, surely not. Or would you say "The Commodore 64 - by Jack Tramiel"? Or "Microsoft Word - by Bill Gates"? Damn, that guy Steve Jobs was crazy about computers and technology, but he was just a very talented CEO who didn't have much of an idea about the internals and how these machines actually worked.
Blame Jack Tramiel for not evolving the MOS/CSG 65xx CPU family in line with the competition like Intel's 286. Acorn Computers funded ARM to replace the uncompetitive MOS/CSG 65xx CPU family.
Major micro-computer companies that used the 65xx CPU family have transitioned to Motorola's 68000.
@bierundkippen720: Well Steve Jobs *did* run the project for a while before getting kicked off, but yes, it was a team project, not just one individual.
@valenrn8657: Yes. Jack could have made a better decision. He was kicked out of Commodore, so who knows what he would done if he had stayed.
yes £learn by doing
That's often the best way to learn!
Both machines are boat anchors.
Not really. They were both extremely historical and paved the way for subsequent computers. Others built upon the innovative technology.
The 8010 is quite a bit heavier than the Lisa, so it would work better for this purpose.
The next time, try it with someone who knows how to operate a camera...
We do our best with the volunteers that we have available. If you want to improve our camera operation, please donate so that we can hire a professional: vcfed.org/donate/
zzzzzzzzzzzz
Yes. I agree. A pretty good video! :)
I found this to be very interesting demo of the Xerox Star!
Yes. Jason did a great presentation.
Thanks!
Very interesting presentation thank you!
Glad you enjoyed it! Jason does a great job!
Thanks!
Apple technology packaging was so ahead of everyone.
Steve Jobs was brilliant at marketing.
Big shoutout to frog design, who crafted most of the cases
How do the scroll bars work/behave on the Xerox?
Maybe these websites will help: guidebookgallery.org/articles/handsacrossthescreen archive.org/details/XeroxViewPointSoftware
@@vcfederation Thanks. After all the corporate stuffiness of the Viewpoint video, that ending bit certainly caught me off guard, lol.