Glossary » Xerox Star
Xerox Star
the first commercial computer with a graphical user interface, the Xerox Star was a high-end workstation designed for document processing. It failed to be a major market success, but heavily influenced machines made afterwards, such as the Macintosh.
Initial research on graphical user interfaces began at Xerox PARC in the late 70s, with a variety of influences, but especially the work of Doug Engelbart and his colleagues at SRI in the late 60s, where they developed the mouse and early windowing systems. Other major systems developed at PARC included the Xerox Alto and SmallTalk, as well as Ethernet and the predecessor printer control languages that led to PostScript.
