Xerox Star vs. Apple Lisa 

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.

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. :-)

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 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)

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.

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.

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.

thank you for keeping up these old computers up and running that started the internet.

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.

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.

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.

Great work and share! Thanks!

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.

"Wastebasket" also sounds superior to "Recycle bin"

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

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.

Very interesting presentation thank you!

I found this to be very interesting demo of the Xerox Star!

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.

Great job!

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.

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.

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?

Mind blowing that this tech was available when most computers were using DOS

Document centric was also a feature on os/2 same post-it note setup

Thanks for sharing.

wow!! love this ... funny to see how archaic the original gui is lol

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.

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...

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.

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. :)

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.

Xerox also built a Time Machine but didn’t see the commercial appeal.

Apple technology packaging was so ahead of everyone.

I love old technology.

How do the scroll bars work/behave on the Xerox?

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

Very nice

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.

IF YOU DO THIS WE LOVE YOU FOREVER

its insane how good and cheap computers have become.

Why is the date not set correctly on both of these? Are both not Y2K compliant?

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.

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

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.

Jason Perkins looks like me, that's crazy!

I have only used a 5 inch floppy, not the 8 inch. I must be TOO YOUNG.

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

Yes I can buy searched catalog items.

The size of that beauty. I wonder how many hundreds of times faster my watch is.

Apple also paid Xerox 1 million to license some of the ideas behind it. So, not stolen in any way.

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.

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

yes £learn by doing

Both machines are boat anchors.

"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.

The next time, try it with someone who knows how to operate a camera...

zzzzzzzzzzzz

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