Editing Xerox Star (section)

==Marketing and commercial reception==
{{Original research|section|date=August 2009}}
[[File:Rank Xerox 8010+40 brochure front.jpg|thumb|right|[[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 {{US$|long=no|16000}}, a typical office would need to buy at least 2 or 3 machines along with a file server and a name server/print server. Spending {{val|p=$|50000| to |100000|fmt=commas}} for a complete installation was not an easy sale, when a secretary's annual salary was about {{US$|long=no|12000}} and a [[VIC-20]] cost around {{US$|long=no|300}}.

Later incarnations of the Star allow users to buy one unit with a [[laser printer]], but only about 25,000 units were sold, leading many to consider it 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,<ref>{{cite book
 | last = Norman
 | first = Donald A.
 | author-link = Donald Norman
 | title = The Invisible Computer
 | publisher = MIT Press
 | year = 1999
 | location = Cambridge, Massachusetts
 | page = 274
 | isbn = 978-0-262-64041-1
 | url-access = registration
 | url = https://archive.org/details/invisiblecompute00norm_0/page/274/mode/2up?q=ahead
 }}</ref> that few outside of a small circle of developers really understood the potential of the system,<ref>{{cite book
 | last = Norman
 | first = Donald A.
 | author-link = Donald Norman
 | title = The Invisible Computer
 | publisher = MIT Press
 | year = 1999
 | location = Cambridge, Massachusetts
 | page = [https://archive.org/details/invisiblecompute00norm_0/page/316 316]
 | isbn = 978-0-262-64041-1
 | url-access = registration
 | url = https://archive.org/details/invisiblecompute00norm_0/page/316
 }}</ref> considering that [[IBM]] introduced its 8088-based [[IBM PC]] running the comparatively primitive [[PC DOS]] the same year as the Star. However, comparison with the IBM PC may be irrelevant: well before it was introduced, buyers in the word processing industry were aware of the 8086-based [[IBM Displaywriter]],<ref>IBM's launch presentation (at 103 Wigmore St London in September 1980) claimed the Displaywriter uses three 8086 chips, though 1x8086 + 2x8088 seems more credible.{{Citation needed|reason=A verifiable source is needed for the statement that the Displaywriter used the 8086|date=April 2016}}</ref> 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)|Byte]]'' magazine,<ref>{{cite magazine
 |url=http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/smalltalk/byte_aug81/design_principles_behind_smalltalk.html 
 |title=Design Principles Behind Smalltalk 
 |author=Dan Ingalls 
 |date=August 1981 
 |magazine=[[Byte (magazine)|Byte]]
 |volume=6
 |issue=8
 |pages=286–298
 |publisher=McGraw-Hill 
 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070927190743/http://users.ipa.net/~dwighth/smalltalk/byte_aug81/design_principles_behind_smalltalk.html 
 |archive-date=September 27, 2007 |url-status = dead
}}</ref> 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 language]]s 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 later 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 can 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.

The successor to the Star, the Xerox 6085 PCS, uses a different, more efficient hardware platform, [[Xerox Daybreak|Daybreak]], using a new, faster processor, and accompanied by significant rewriting of the Star software, renamed ViewPoint, to improve performance. The new system was released in 1985. The new hardware provided 1&nbsp;MB to 4&nbsp;MB of memory, a 10&nbsp;MB to 80&nbsp;MB hard disk, a 15" or 19" display, a 5.25" floppy drive, a mouse, Ethernet connection and a price of a little over {{US$|long=no|6000}}.

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 (car)|Rolls-Royce]] in the world of lower cost {{US$|long=no|2000}} 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 in 1996 ran as an emulator on [[Oracle Solaris|Solaris]], Microsoft [[Windows 3.1]], [[Windows 95]], or [[Windows 98]], and [[OS/2]].