Xerox (RE: Lisa's scores)

Kai Kaltenbach wrote: Half right. :-) To my knowledge (and I may be wrong), there is no such thing as a Xerox "Star." Star was simply the name of the software that ran on the computer (a Xerox 8010). It did, however, become common to all the machine a Star, much like people nowdays call a PC their "Windows" box. It really used to annoy me when people would say "Can you star that document to me?", which meant, "Can you mail me that document to me?" Anyway, the Alto and 8010 are related, but are _very_ different machines, and the Alto was never offered commercially (almost was though). The graphical system that ran on the Alto (XDE, or Xerox Development Environment) was updated to run on the 8010's, 6085's, and I understand, even on PC's under Windows a few years back. To my knowledge, Star (which later became Viewpoint) never ran on the Alto. Hmmm, I haven't read the book, but Xerox certainly fumbled the future on a number of things! Having worked on one of those fumbled things, and used others, it's quite annoying. Anyway, common folklore at Xerox (right or wrong) is that Xerox was showing off the UI to Jobs, not realizing what it had, or that Jobs would want it. I also understand that Jobs hired a number of people who had worked on it away from Xerox, to work on the Lisa. Most feel that while Jobs did not quite steal the UI, it was close enough to be the same thing! :-) ~ Mike