Hardware

Initially, the Star software was to run on a new series of virtual-memory processors, described in a PARC technical report called, "Wildflower: An Architecture for a Personal Computer", by Butler Lampson. The machines had names that always began with the letter D.
The first of these machines was the Dolphin, built with transistor-transistor logic (TTL) technology. The complexity of the software eventually overwhelmed its limited configuration. At one time in Star's development, it took more than half an hour to reboot the system.
The next Star workstation hardware was known as a Dandelion (often shortened to "Dlion"). It had a microprogrammed central processing unit (CPU), based on the AMD Am2900 bitslice microprocessor technology, that implemented a virtual machine for the programming language Mesa. An enhanced version of the Dandelion, with more microcode space, was dubbed the “Dandetiger.”
The base Dandelion system had 384 kB memory (expandable to 1.5 MB), a 10 MB, 29 MB or 40 MB 8" hard drive, an 8" floppy drive, mouse and an Ethernet connection. The performance of this machine, which sold for $20,000, was about 850 in the Dhrystone benchmark — comparable to that of a VAX-11/750, which cost five times more. The 17 inches (43 cm) cathode ray tube (CRT) display (black and white, 1024×809 pixels with 38.7 Hz refresh^[8]) was large by the time's standards. It was meant to be able to display two 8.5×11 in pages side by side in true size. An interesting feature of the display was that the overscan area (borders) could be programmed with a 16×16 pattern. This was used to extend the root window pattern to all the edges of the monitor, a feature that is unavailable even today on most video cards.
The next design, the Dorado, used an emitter coupled logic (ECL) processor. It was four times faster than Dandelion on standard benchmarks, and thus competitive with the fastest super minicomputers of the day. It was used for research but was a rack-mounted CPU that was never intended to be an office product.^[9] A network router called Dicentra was also based on this design.

Marketing and commercial reception

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Rank Xerox brochure for 8010/40 system

The Xerox Star was not originally meant to be a stand-alone computer, but to be part of an integrated Xerox "personal office system" that also connected to other workstations and network services via Ethernet. Although a single unit sold for $16,000, a typical office would need to buy at least 2 or 3 machines along with a file server and a name server/print server. Spending $50,000 to $100,000 for a complete installation was not an easy sell, when a secretary's annual salary was about $12,000 and a Commodore VIC-20 cost around $300.
Later incarnations of the Star would allow users to buy one unit with a laser printer, but even so, only about 25,000 units were sold, leading many to consider the Xerox Star a commercial failure.
The workstation was originally designed to run the Star software for performing office tasks, but it was also sold with different software for other markets. These other configurations included a workstation for Interlisp or Smalltalk, and a server.
Some have said that the Star was ahead of its time, that few outside of a small circle of developers really understood the potential of the system,^[10] considering that IBM introduced their 8088-based IBM PC running the comparatively primitive PC DOS the same year that the Star was brought to market. However, comparison with the IBM PC may be irrelevant: well before it was launched, buyers in the Word Processing industry were aware of the 8086-based IBM Displaywriter,^[11] the full-page portrait black-on-white Xerox 860 page display system and the 120 page-per-minute Xerox 9700 laser printer. Furthermore, the design principles of Smalltalk and modeless working had been extensively discussed in the August 1981 issue of Byte magazine,^[12] so Xerox PARC's standing and the potential of the Star can scarcely have been lost on its target (office systems) market, who would never have expected IBM to position a mass-market PC to threaten far more profitable dedicated WP systems. Unfortunately, the influential niche market of pioneering players in electronic publishing such as Longman were already aligning their production processes towards generic markup languages such as SGML (forerunner of HTML and XML) whereby authors using inexpensive offline systems could describe document structure, making their manuscripts ready for transfer to computer to film systems that offered far higher resolution than the then maximum of 360 dpi laser printing technologies.
Another possible reason given for the lack of success of the Star was Xerox's corporate structure. A longtime copier company, Xerox played to their strengths. They already had one significant failure in making their acquisition of Scientific Data Systems pay off. It is said that there were internal jealousies between the old line copier systems divisions that were responsible for bulk of Xerox's revenues and the new upstart division. Their marketing efforts were seen by some as half-hearted or unfocused. Furthermore, the most technically savvy sales representatives that might have sold office automation equipment were paid large commissions on leases of laser printer equipment costing up to a half-million dollars. No commission structure for decentralized systems could compete. The multi-lingual technical documentation market was also a major opportunity, but this needed cross-border collaboration for which few sales organisations were ready at the time.
Even within Xerox Corporation, in the mid-1980s, there was little understanding of the system. Few corporate executives ever saw or used the system, and the sales teams, if they requested a computer to assist with their planning, would instead receive older, CP/M-based Xerox 820 or 820-II systems. There was no effort to seed the 8010/8012 Star systems within Xerox Corporation.
Probably most significantly, strategic planners at the Xerox Systems Group (XSG) felt that they could not compete against other workstation makers such as Apollo Computer or Symbolics. The Xerox name alone was considered their greatest asset, but it did not produce customers.
Finally, by today's standards, the system would be considered very slow, due partly to the limited hardware of the time, and partly to a poorly implemented file system; saving a large file could take minutes. Crashes could be followed by an hours-long process called file scavenging, signaled by the appearance of the diagnostic code 7511 in the top left corner of the screen.
In the end, the Star's weak commercial reception probably came down to price, performance in demonstrations, and weakness of sales channels. Even then Apple Computer's Lisa, inspired by the Star and introduced 2 years later, was a market failure, for many of the same reasons as the Star. To credit Xerox, they did try many things to try to improve sales. The next release of Star was on a different, more efficient hardware platform, Daybreak, using a new, faster processor, and accompanied by significant rewriting of the Star software, renamed ViewPoint, to improve performance. The new system, dubbed the Xerox 6085 PCS, was released in 1985. The new hardware provided 1 MB to 4 MB of memory, a 10 MB to 80 MB hard disk, a 15" or 19" display, a 5.25" floppy drive, a mouse, Ethernet connection and a price of a little over $6,000.
The Xerox 6085 could be sold along with an attached laser printer as a standalone system. Also offered was a PC compatibility mode via an 80186-based expansion board. Users could transfer files between the ViewPoint system and PC-based software, albeit with some difficulty because the file formats were incompatible with any on the PC. But even with a significantly lower price, it was still a Rolls Royce in the world of lower cost $2,000 personal computers.
In 1989, Viewpoint 2.0 introduced many new applications related to desktop publishing. Eventually, Xerox jettisoned the integrated hardware/software workstation offered by Viewpoint and offered a software-only product called GlobalView, providing the Star interface and technology on an IBM PC compatible platform. The initial release required installing a MESA CPU add-on board. The final release of GlobalView 2.1 ran as an emulator on Sun Solaris, Microsoft Windows 3.1, Windows 95, or Windows 98, IBM OS/2 and was released in 1996.
In the end, Xerox PARC, which prided itself upon building hardware 10 years ahead of its time and equipping each researcher with the hardware so they could get started on the software, enabled Xerox to bring the product to market 5 years too early, all throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s. The custom-hardware platform was always too expensive for the mission for which Star/Viewpoint was intended. Apple, having copied the Xerox Star in the early 1980s with Lisa, struggled and had the same poor results. Apple's second, cost-reduced effort, the Macintosh, barely succeeded (by ditching the virtual memory, implementing it in software, and using commodity microprocessors) - and was not their most profitable product in the late 1980s. Apple also struggled to make profits on office system software in the same time period. L Peter Deutsch, one of the pioneers of the Postscript language, finally found a way to achieve Xerox-Star-like efficiency using just-in-time compilation in the early 1990s for bitmap operations, making the last bit of Xerox-Star custom hardware, the BitBLT, obsolete by 1990.