6 ms·

Xerox Star Keyboard

72 points by ZeljkoS 4y ago

ZeljkoS 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star
kps 4y ago
The left function cluster replaced the chord set of Engelbart's NLS and the Alto, while retaining the same two-handed style of operation: mouse on the right to select the object, keys on the left to select the operation. Worth also noting that Star didn't use the Clipboard Cut/Copy/Paste (fragile invisible state) model, which I think came from Larry Tesler and certainly was popularized by the Macintosh. Instead it had the two operations MOVE, which moved the current selection to the target location, and COPY, which duplicated the current selection at the target location.
- azinman2 4y ago
  Move is a far better term than cut.
  - speed_spread 4y ago
    Move implies some atomicity, Cut is only the first phase of an operation that also involves zero to n Paste commands. And paste also combines with Copy for more variants.
  - layer8 4y ago
    Not really, because you can paste multiple times from cut (except in Excel).
dillera 4y ago
The DB alto is now in Baltimore, MD- and you can touch it! https://youtu.be/xoAkqEjnNK0?t=46 https://youtu.be/xoAkqEjnNK0?t=46
loudthing 4y ago
It's weird they don't say what year its from. (AFAIK this keyboard mouse combo appeared in 1981).
- masswerk 4y ago
  Mind that this is a subpage of a much larger segment of the digibarn site. The front page [1] reads, 'The Xerox 8010 (aka "Star") was introduced in 1981.' [1] https://www.digibarn.com/friends/curbow/star/index.html https://www.digibarn.com/friends/curbow/star/index.html
ianbicking 4y ago
The AGAIN and SAME keys are interesting. I can imagine what AGAIN would do. Like if you pasted an image, AGAIN would paste the same image. But I imagine it applying to a deeply nested menu item or other control which might be hard to access over and over. At least that's what I imagine, it would be great to know how it was really intended to be used. SAME is provocative, but I can't quite figure out what it would do. Given a single selected object it might select all similar objects? Or given a text selection, show other instances of that text? On the right side, what does the KEYBOARD key do? I'm really at a loss on that one. On the enter key there's two symbols. Is that maybe to indicate that enter does CR/LF (next line, back to beginning), but with shift it just does CR (back to beginning of line)? There's COPY and MOVE, but no PASTE. I'm not sure if you do COPY+MOVE to do the modern cut/paste, or...?
- kps 4y ago
  SAME is a copy style/properties operation; it modifies the selection to have the properties of the target. AGAIN repeats the previous operation on the current (presumably new) selection. KEYBOARD brought up an on-screen keyboard for special characters. MOVE moved the current selection to the target location, and COPY duplicated the current selection at the target location. There was no invisible clipboard. [also previously edited into my comment below] See The star user interface: an overview which is now happily free: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1500774.1500840 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1500774.1500840
  - bombcar 4y ago
    For those who don't know, Office has "Format Painter" which does this - select the text you want it to look like, select it, and then select the text to change. https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/use-the-format-painter-4bb415a9-d4e4-42b7-b579-170adc594e40 https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/use-the-format-pa...
    - chess_buster 4y ago
      Apple Pages, too.
cosmojg 4y ago
If only we were still seeing this kind of commercial innovation in computer interfaces. Where did it go?
- pinko 4y ago
  Some would say AR is a commercial innovation in computer interfaces. (I'm not one of them, but I think it's worth mentioning...)
- linspace 4y ago
  There is no money in interface innovation. Certainly not for keyboards, over which only programmers obsses (me included). Most people is interested in how it looks at best, not in how effective it's going to be for typing or if they will be better to stay in the zone. We represent 0.1% of users (number totally fake).
azinman2 4y ago
The keyboard key is very meta.
GeekyBear 4y ago
A film from Xerox demonstrating the Xerox Star UI from back in the day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJzYRgmnJrE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJzYRgmnJrE The Star was around $50,000 per additional workstation in today's dollars, although the 'starter kit' with a workstation, file/print/mail server, and laser printer that you had to purchase first ran around $240,000 in today's dollars.
- walrus01 4y ago
  imagine the workstation you could build today for $50k from x86-64 parts, probably a dual socket motherboard with a pair of $7000 xeons or epyc in it and 2TB+ of RAM.
- outworlder 4y ago
  The keyboard has such a satisfying "clunk" sound. It puts my Cherry Blues to shame.
  - kps 4y ago
    Xerox soon replaced that keyboard due to European ergonomic standards; the newer low-profile was actually one of the first products to use Cherry MX switches. https://deskthority.net/wiki/Xerox_Star_low-profile_keyboard https://deskthority.net/wiki/Xerox_Star_low-profile_keyboard
D13Fd 4y ago
All of those extra keys, and no left/right/up/down arrow keys. Crazy.
- kps 4y ago
  The original Macintosh keyboard didn't have cursor keys either. You were expected to use the mouse. Star at least had the NEXT key to select the next item/field, rather than the horrible conflation with TAB that the Macintosh HIG and IBM CUA jointly saddled us with.
  - digisign 4y ago
    Works well though. I wouldn't want tab characters in my text fields.
    - kps 4y ago
      But I don't want my ‘next field’ key to suddently stop moving between fields and instead enter characters, just because some fields of text are different from other fields of text. The mess goes back to IBM pre-computer unit record (punch card) equipment, for which fields were just columns on a card and moving to the next tab stop was the same as moving to the next field if you set up your keypunch appropriately.
- NonNefarious 4y ago
  But look, it has a Delete key AND a Backspace key... just every normal keyboard today. But inexplicably not the vast majority of Apple's.
  - alexdbird 4y ago
    Fn + backspace does this on every Apple keyboard. IMO it’s gloriously consistent compared to the bizarre places that delete ends up on PC laptops and compact keyboards.
    - 4y ago
juliendorra 4y ago
The Xerox Star 2-button mouse behavior was also quite different than what we would expect today. The Star would feel very odd to someone used to Mac OS, Windows or any other desktop from the last 40 years. I did a small thread about it some times ago, with cool pictures from the Star manual to illustrate: https://twitter.com/juliendorra/status/1445017080768647180 https://twitter.com/juliendorra/status/1445017080768647180 summary: The Xerox Star mouse had 2 buttons, but it's quite mysterious today what was the use of the 2nd button, as it's nothing like the right mouse button of a standard Windows PC. I had to dig up the manual and even launch an emulator to really get a sense of how different it was. On Xerox Alto the mouse had 3 buttons that were confusing for users: "We observed that the dozens of Alto programs all had different semantics for the mouse buttons " When designing the Xerox Star UI, the team knew they needed to go for less mouse buttons. And they wanted to go for a one-button mouse. But, by their own admission in a paper at the time, they couldn’t find a way! So they settled on a two button mouse, where both buttons are needed to complete selection tasks, even thinking that it was not possible to have proper GUI interaction with less than 2 buttons. Their main issue was that inheriting the Alto ways of selecting, they couldn’t find a way to make selection easy for users with one single mouse button. For example to select text, you clicked with the left button at the start of your selection, then with the right button at the end. Of course on Macintosh all operations that needed 2 buttons on the Star could be done with one button thanks to drag to select and drag-and-drop! Jef Raskin had been set on a one-button mouse early on, and he solved it with click-and-drag to select icons (and text) But the Star team was stuck in a sort of UI local maxima… And the right button on Star had other varied usages depending on the context, like adjusting windows or jumping in documents. So they didn’t even really manage to lift the Alto confusing changing semantics, which was the initial goal when going from 3 to 2 buttons.

72 points by ZeljkoS 4y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star

kps 4y ago

The left function cluster replaced the chord set of Engelbart's NLS and the Alto, while retaining the same two-handed style of operation: mouse on the right to select the object, keys on the left to select the operation. Worth also noting that Star didn't use the Clipboard Cut/Copy/Paste (fragile invisible state) model, which I think came from Larry Tesler and certainly was popularized by the Macintosh. Instead it had the two operations MOVE, which moved the current selection to the target location, and COPY, which duplicated the current selection at the target location.

azinman2 4y ago
Move is a far better term than cut.
- speed_spread 4y ago
  Move implies some atomicity, Cut is only the first phase of an operation that also involves zero to n Paste commands. And paste also combines with Copy for more variants.
- layer8 4y ago
  Not really, because you can paste multiple times from cut (except in Excel).

dillera 4y ago

The DB alto is now in Baltimore, MD- and you can touch it! https://youtu.be/xoAkqEjnNK0?t=46 https://youtu.be/xoAkqEjnNK0?t=46

loudthing 4y ago

It's weird they don't say what year its from. (AFAIK this keyboard mouse combo appeared in 1981).

masswerk 4y ago
Mind that this is a subpage of a much larger segment of the digibarn site. The front page [1] reads, 'The Xerox 8010 (aka "Star") was introduced in 1981.' [1] https://www.digibarn.com/friends/curbow/star/index.html https://www.digibarn.com/friends/curbow/star/index.html

ianbicking 4y ago

The AGAIN and SAME keys are interesting. I can imagine what AGAIN would do. Like if you pasted an image, AGAIN would paste the same image. But I imagine it applying to a deeply nested menu item or other control which might be hard to access over and over. At least that's what I imagine, it would be great to know how it was really intended to be used. SAME is provocative, but I can't quite figure out what it would do. Given a single selected object it might select all similar objects? Or given a text selection, show other instances of that text? On the right side, what does the KEYBOARD key do? I'm really at a loss on that one. On the enter key there's two symbols. Is that maybe to indicate that enter does CR/LF (next line, back to beginning), but with shift it just does CR (back to beginning of line)? There's COPY and MOVE, but no PASTE. I'm not sure if you do COPY+MOVE to do the modern cut/paste, or...?

kps 4y ago
SAME is a copy style/properties operation; it modifies the selection to have the properties of the target. AGAIN repeats the previous operation on the current (presumably new) selection. KEYBOARD brought up an on-screen keyboard for special characters. MOVE moved the current selection to the target location, and COPY duplicated the current selection at the target location. There was no invisible clipboard. [also previously edited into my comment below] See The star user interface: an overview which is now happily free: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1500774.1500840 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1500774.1500840
- bombcar 4y ago
  For those who don't know, Office has "Format Painter" which does this - select the text you want it to look like, select it, and then select the text to change. https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/use-the-format-painter-4bb415a9-d4e4-42b7-b579-170adc594e40 https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/use-the-format-pa...
  - chess_buster 4y ago
    Apple Pages, too.

cosmojg 4y ago

If only we were still seeing this kind of commercial innovation in computer interfaces. Where did it go?

pinko 4y ago
Some would say AR is a commercial innovation in computer interfaces. (I'm not one of them, but I think it's worth mentioning...)
linspace 4y ago
There is no money in interface innovation. Certainly not for keyboards, over which only programmers obsses (me included). Most people is interested in how it looks at best, not in how effective it's going to be for typing or if they will be better to stay in the zone. We represent 0.1% of users (number totally fake).

azinman2 4y ago

The keyboard key is very meta.

GeekyBear 4y ago

A film from Xerox demonstrating the Xerox Star UI from back in the day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJzYRgmnJrE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJzYRgmnJrE The Star was around $50,000 per additional workstation in today's dollars, although the 'starter kit' with a workstation, file/print/mail server, and laser printer that you had to purchase first ran around $240,000 in today's dollars.

walrus01 4y ago
imagine the workstation you could build today for $50k from x86-64 parts, probably a dual socket motherboard with a pair of $7000 xeons or epyc in it and 2TB+ of RAM.
outworlder 4y ago
The keyboard has such a satisfying "clunk" sound. It puts my Cherry Blues to shame.
- kps 4y ago
  Xerox soon replaced that keyboard due to European ergonomic standards; the newer low-profile was actually one of the first products to use Cherry MX switches. https://deskthority.net/wiki/Xerox_Star_low-profile_keyboard https://deskthority.net/wiki/Xerox_Star_low-profile_keyboard

D13Fd 4y ago

All of those extra keys, and no left/right/up/down arrow keys. Crazy.

kps 4y ago
The original Macintosh keyboard didn't have cursor keys either. You were expected to use the mouse. Star at least had the NEXT key to select the next item/field, rather than the horrible conflation with TAB that the Macintosh HIG and IBM CUA jointly saddled us with.
- digisign 4y ago
  Works well though. I wouldn't want tab characters in my text fields.
  - kps 4y ago
    But I don't want my ‘next field’ key to suddently stop moving between fields and instead enter characters, just because some fields of text are different from other fields of text. The mess goes back to IBM pre-computer unit record (punch card) equipment, for which fields were just columns on a card and moving to the next tab stop was the same as moving to the next field if you set up your keypunch appropriately.
NonNefarious 4y ago
But look, it has a Delete key AND a Backspace key... just every normal keyboard today. But inexplicably not the vast majority of Apple's.
- alexdbird 4y ago
  Fn + backspace does this on every Apple keyboard. IMO it’s gloriously consistent compared to the bizarre places that delete ends up on PC laptops and compact keyboards.
  - 4y ago

juliendorra 4y ago

The Xerox Star 2-button mouse behavior was also quite different than what we would expect today. The Star would feel very odd to someone used to Mac OS, Windows or any other desktop from the last 40 years. I did a small thread about it some times ago, with cool pictures from the Star manual to illustrate: https://twitter.com/juliendorra/status/1445017080768647180 https://twitter.com/juliendorra/status/1445017080768647180 summary: The Xerox Star mouse had 2 buttons, but it's quite mysterious today what was the use of the 2nd button, as it's nothing like the right mouse button of a standard Windows PC. I had to dig up the manual and even launch an emulator to really get a sense of how different it was. On Xerox Alto the mouse had 3 buttons that were confusing for users: "We observed that the dozens of Alto programs all had different semantics for the mouse buttons " When designing the Xerox Star UI, the team knew they needed to go for less mouse buttons. And they wanted to go for a one-button mouse. But, by their own admission in a paper at the time, they couldn’t find a way! So they settled on a two button mouse, where both buttons are needed to complete selection tasks, even thinking that it was not possible to have proper GUI interaction with less than 2 buttons. Their main issue was that inheriting the Alto ways of selecting, they couldn’t find a way to make selection easy for users with one single mouse button. For example to select text, you clicked with the left button at the start of your selection, then with the right button at the end. Of course on Macintosh all operations that needed 2 buttons on the Star could be done with one button thanks to drag to select and drag-and-drop! Jef Raskin had been set on a one-button mouse early on, and he solved it with click-and-drag to select icons (and text) But the Star team was stuck in a sort of UI local maxima… And the right button on Star had other varied usages depending on the context, like adjusting windows or jumping in documents. So they didn’t even really manage to lift the Alto confusing changing semantics, which was the initial goal when going from 3 to 2 buttons.