The Star was the epitome of PARC's user-friendly machine. No secretary had to learn about programming or code to use the machine, any
more than she had to understand the servomechanism driving the dancing golf ball to type on an IBM Selectric typewriter. Changing a font, or
a margin, or the space between typed lines in most cases required a keystroke or two or a couple of intuitive mouse clicks. The user understood
what was happening entirely from watching the icons or documents
move or change on the screen. This was no accident: "When everything
in a computer system is visible on the screen," wrote David Smith, a
designer of the Star interface, "the display becomes reality. Objects and
actions can be understood purely in terms of their effects on the display."
What was even more remarkable was that much of this was accomplished over the objections of Xerox marketing experts, whose kibitzing
about even trivial matters slowed the development process by months.
Irby recalled a particularly trying confrontation over the mouse with a
marketing man from the Dallas division named Ron Johnson.
"The first time he'd ever used a mouse he'd had a bad experience—
apparently he'd used a dirty one that didn't track right," Irby said. "So for
two years he was against our using it, while we spent all our time on user
studies and tests to show him it was the right thing. We spent at least $1
million of Xerox resources proving that it was better than a cursor button
or touch screen, which is what he wanted. Finally we presented all these
findings to him at a meeting—and he still wouldn't go for it!
"That was one of the very few times when I totally exploded. I got
out of my chair and towered over him and yelled about what an idiot
he was being. I screamed, 'We're going to use the mouse, goddamn it!'
and walked out. We never got a complaint from him again."
Had the Star performed up to the level of its dazzling first impression, Xerox might have been able to to establish and hold that beachhead in office computing craved by dozens of executives ranging from
Jim O'Neill to David Liddle.
But the glow faded fast.
The first shortcoming users noticed was its speed. The elaborate system ran, as one of its designers acknowledged, "like molasses." While the
Dandelion processor was a marked improvement over Thacker's Dolphin, it was still overwhelmed by the pure tonnage of a million lines of
heavy-duty Mesa code running under the surface. "The Star software was
built to consume all available computing resources in the universe,"
cracked Smokey Wallace, an SDD engineer.
Another hurdle was its cost. The Star workstation reached the market
at a retail price of $16,595. This might have made sense for equipment
aimed at a high-performance engineering market. But it was far more
than most commercial businesses would spend to furnish a secretary or
clerical worker with capital equipment. Furthermore, nobody could buy
just one Star workstation any more than one can eat just one potato chip.
A meaningful installation required two to ten workstations, plus a highspeed laser printer and Ethernet to link it all together. That raised the
per-user cost to at least $30,000 and the price of the whole integrated system to a quarter of a million dollars or more. Some experts forecast that
the Star would not sell until Xerox reeducated its customers to use it
properly and made it cheaper. "Its a good product," one said, "for the
second half of the 1980s."
Within a few months of its launch the Star began to look like an egregious marketing blunder. It was the old story of engineers building a
system that only engineers could love—except that instead of building
one too complicated for average users, SDD had built one too big.
It seemed as though SDD as an organization had been driven by
designers lacking any counterweight of sales and marketing professionals. As Lampson observed later, "It was kind of amazing that this company whose biggest single strength was marketing set up an organization
composed entirely of engineers to get them into a whole new line of
business."
In truth, SDD did have marketing advice. The problem was that,
possibly for the first time in Xerox history, the marketing experts were
so overawed by the system they were examining that they were themselves swept up in the engineers' enthusiasm.
The upshot was a series of surveys known internally as the "Wave"
studies, on which the company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars
to analyze its customer base. Undertaken during Spinrad's stewardship
of SDD, well before the division priced and launched the Star, the
Wave studies compiled data from telephone and face-to-face interviews with decision-makers at nearly 100 companies, as well as on-site
surveys at another fifteen businesses that lasted several weeks each,
into a shelf full of thick loose-leaf binders.
Wave concluded that the Star was so good and latent demand so strong
that customers would clamor for the technology regardless of price. To
the monopoly-minded executives of Xerox, this was familiar and gratifying territoiy. A machine that could be sold or leased for any price—it was
the 914 all over again!
The SDD engineers therefore considered themselves free to create
absolutely the best office system they could imagine. Blinded by the
almost religious fervor that seizes software and hardware developers
set loose in a boundless design space, they shoveled every sophisticated function they could contrive into the Star without giving a
moment's thought to the one real-world player whose opinion was critical: the buyer.
"The techies were given their head to make the best system they
could," Spinrad lamented years later. "There were no constraints of any
substance put on us as to the cost of the product, as far as I remember.
But what the Wave studies missed was that there were other things coming along they didn't recognize."
This was an understatement. In 1975, or even 1979, one might have
argued that the Star's technology would place it in a class by itself, that it
would blow away every other office machine on the market on its way to
becoming an instant
de facto
standard. In 1981 the same argument was
dangerously presumptuous. For at a secret skunk works in Boca Raton, a
couple of miles from where Xerox had held its spectacular company picnic, an IBM team had slapped together a machine that would annihilate
the market for big, integrated office systems.
IBM launched its Chess machine, renamed simply the Personal Computer, in August 1981, a scant four months after the Star. Judged against
the technology PARC had brought forth, it was a homely and feeble creature. Rather than bitmapped graphics and variable typefaces, its screen
displayed only ASCII characters, glowing a hideous monochromatic
green against a black background. Instead of a mouse, the PC had four
arrow keys on the keyboard that laboriously moved the cursor, character
by character and line by line. No icons, no desktop metaphor, no multitasking windows, no e-mail, no Ethernet. Forswearing the Star's intuitive
point-and-click operability, IBM forced its customers to master an
abstruse lexicon of typed commands and cryptic responses developed by
Microsoft, its software partner. Where the Star was a masterpiece of integrated reliability, the PC had a perverse tendency to crash at random (a
character flaw it bequeathed to many subsequent generations of
Microsoft Windows-driven machines).
But where the Star sold for $16,595-plus, the IBM PC sold for less
than $5,000, all-inclusive. Where the Star's operating system was
closed, accessible for enhancement only to those to whom Xerox
granted a coded key, the PC's circuitry and microcode were wide open
to anyone willing to hack a program for it—just like the Alto's.
And it sold in the millions.
The introduction of the IBM PC changed the business computer
market the way Hiroshima changed the world's conception of battlefield weaponry. The PC demonstrated that the business user would
gladly forego graphical bells and whistles and seamless system integration and would tolerate
a
large dose of flakiness in order to save on
price. IBM proved correct everyone who had warned that the Star was
too big, too complicated, too expensive—too good.
How serious a blow the IBM PC represented to large-scale systems
like the Star would become increasingly evident over the next year, as
the Star's sales lagged behind Xerox's projections and the PC's surpassed IBM's.
The Star was to enjoy just one more moment of triumph. In December
1981 the Japanese version was introduced at the Tokyo Data Show by
Fuji Xerox, the company's Japanese partner, with Liddle in attendance
along with Bill English and his engineering partner Joe Becker, who had
created the Japanese display system. The price was 4 million yen per
workstation, or about $16,000. The acclaim was even greater than its
domestic cousin had received in Chicago eight mondis earlier.
"The presentation aimed at the most dramatic effect; it seemed to disembowel the other exhibitors," wrote the correspondent of the Japanese
computer journal
ASCII.
"Comparing Star with Japanese computer
makers' office computers in the 4-million-yen class, their capabilities are
as different as clouds from mud."
Clouds from mud
Upon hearing the phrase from a Japanese interpreter reading the review aloud, Dave Liddle burst out with a delighted
laugh. "Boy," he said, "you can't do any better than that!"
The exodus from SDD picked up steam after the Star introduction.
One day Bob Belleville got a call from Steve Jobs, who badgered him into
quitting by yelling, "Everything you've ever done in your life is terrible,
so why don't you come work for me?" Massaro and Liddle left in 1982 to
found Metaphor Computer.
Metaphor
soon brought out a workstation
that resembled the Star on the surface, but ran on
a
lightning-fast
Motorola 68000 microprocessor,
the
same one that would soon turn up as
the heart and brain of the
Apple Macintosh. A
dimly remembered name
now, Metaphor experienced great success for more than five years, until
it was bought out and its nameplate retired—by
IBM.
As
for the Star, it lived on for many years
as
the crowning glory of a
niche market, a specialty product and a legend, somewhat like the fancy
futuristic cars—time machines, so to
speak—which Detroit
auto makers
manufacture for the big car shows but seldom actually get on the road.
Instead of sales in the hundreds of thousands, as
Xerox
once dared anticipate, only about 30,000 Stars were ever ordered.