Design Retrospective: Smalltalk and the Xerox Star
590H -- Spring 1995
Comments on Alan Kay videotape, paper on the history of Smalltalk
see also: Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander, "Fumbling the Future:
How Xerox Invented, Then Ignorned, the First Personal Computer"
Kay provides one answer to the question of how to make radical advances in
human-computer interaction without just focussing on the technology
focus of early Learning Research Group work: children
advantages of kids as users over adults: they won't put up with as much
(they'll do something else if the interface is bad), they like things
lively, ...
interface designed to make simultaneous use of different modalities:
kinesthetic (direct manipulation), visual, symbolic. Compare with work of
Piaget, Hadamard.
Problems with Xerox Corporation:
- models of high-risk research (see Alan Kay quote)
- culture clash (see for example Rolling Stone article)
- corporate culture didn't encourage rapid product development
- problems with lawyers
- ... and more
The Xerox Star
Star: Xerox's commercialization of the PARC research on bitmapped displays,
mice, windows, Ethernet, etc etc ...
an office automation system; integrated applications
desktop metaphor (see e.g. documents, outbasket, folders, etc)
consistent UI design: generic commands (copy, move, open, show properties,
copy properties). Property sheets. Few modes.
user studies employed during development, e.g. for icon recognition
Not a major commercial success
reasons given in paper:
- Xerox didn't pay enough attention to industry trends (cheap,
standalone PC's)
- not enough attention to customer's wants; not an open, extensible
architecture
- inadequate performance
- geographically split development organization
- overly dogmatic about desktop metaphor
Good points of Star (from paper):
- iconic, direct manipulation interface
- generic commands; consistency
- mouse
- high-resolution display
- good graphic design
- 16 bit character set
- distributed personal computing