Xerox Star

The Xerox Star, released in 1981, didn’t sell well, but it changed the future of personal computing in big ways.

The Star was the first system to use a graphical interface with icons, windows, and a mouse. Before this, people used text commands to control computers, which wasn’t easy for non-experts. The GUI made computers much more approachable for everyday users.

It also introduced the idea of a desktop with files and folders represented as icons, similar to a real desk. This made organizing digital files more intuitive.
Even though it wasn’t a commercial success, the Star heavily influenced later systems like Apple’s Macintosh and Microsoft Windows. A lot of what we consider standard today—like drag-and-drop and networked offices—originated from the Xerox Star.

In short, the Xerox Star set the foundation for the personal computers we use now, making them more user-friendly and practical.

As we all noticed, there are so many things that affect history of interaction design, one of it will be the Xerox Star, launched in 1981, marked a turning point in the history of computing by introducing several profound concepts that really redefined how people interact with computers. So, at that period of time, it was the first system to feature a graphical user interface, a complete with windows, icons, and a mouse to point and click, is not it shocking? Making computing far more accessible to people never use or even heard of computer systems. This interface was inspired later systems like Apple’s Macintosh and Microsoft’s Windows, both of which went on to dominate the personal computing world right now.

The design elements of the Xerox Star sets are one screen display but it has own CPU, and one mouse which can do the control, as well as a keyboard, which has most the function control added, those including copy and paste, including sharing and main windows control. All in all, those are the elements we all see in the recent design of computers or laptops, and we take them as granted. Indeed, people are adopted to this interface because so far we did not change a lot, we developed base on it. I barely have any doubt with if the interface are totally different.