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The Star workstation he shepherded to launch was an amazing accomplishment. Enclosed in a squat beige-colored box which, like its ancestral Alto, slid on casters under a desk, the machine came packed with features no one had ever seen before and few envisioned in a commercial office machine. These included a bitmapped screen (in “muted blue,” as Xerox promotional literature described it at the time), a mouse (“an electronic pointing device”), windowed displays, and “What You See Is What You Get” document preparation. The bundled functions included text processing, a drawing program, the first integrated “help” program, and electronic mail. By far the system’s most striking feature was its graphical user interface, the stylized display that communicated with the user via the bitmapped screen. This arrangement of icons and folders built around what the Star designers called the “desktop metaphor” is so familiar today that it seems to have been a part of computing forever. But its pioneering implementation on the Star included some capabilities that had yet to resurface on the market nearly two decades later. Text, formulas, and graphics could all be edited in the same document. (Compare today’s “integrated” software, in
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Michael A. Hiltzik (Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age)