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Xerox Star Keyboard

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72 pointsZeljkoS35 comments

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...?

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

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-pa...

Apple Pages, too.

That was actually my only guess at what the KEYBOARD key did, but a virtual keyboard seemed so modern (and mobile phone inspired) that I dismissed the idea

The SAME key would make text "look the same".

Found at: https://issuu.com/65c02/docs/50890515

"You can select the object(s) to be changed, pus the SAME key, then designate the objects to use as the source. COPY PROPERTIES makes the selection look the "same" as the source. this is particularly useful in graphics editing. Frequently you will have a collection of lines and symbols whose appearance you want to be coordinated (all the same line width, share of grey, etc.). You can select all the objects to be changes, push SAME, and select a line or symbol having the desired appearance."

And AGAIN does what you would mostly expect:

"AGAIN repeats the last command(s) on a new selection. All the commands done since the last time a selection was made are repeated. this is useful when a short sequence of commands needs to be done on several different selections; for example, make several scattered words bold and italic in a larger font."

"MOVE" is "cut" in modern lingo; I think that COPY/MOVE works in a way with "selections" in such a way that you don't need a "PASTE", but I can't really make it out from just that document (which I didn't read in full, I should add).

No mention of the KEYBOARD key; can't think of anything that's supposed to do either.

It's interesting that AGAIN uses selections as checkpoints of a sort. I think that was probably the wrong idea as selections need to be made and remade to get them right, and so they aren't clear checkpoints, but interesting nevertheless. Though ignoring selections that you didn't act on might be sufficient to filter out those mistakes.

The selection/target distinction is also another interesting path not taken. I encountered it in Oberon as well. I remember it feeling quite powerful, and yet I also was easily confused, like it was just a little too much to keep track of.

Interestingly, the AGAIN command is still very much supported in Google Docs/Sheets/Slides (and, I believe, in MS Office as well).

If you "redo" (ctrl-shift-z, or use the toolbar, or whatever) without having just "undone", the app performs the same action you just did on the new selection.

AGAIN is like “.” in Vim.

Some of the popular engineering/technical Unix workstations around then or shortly after also had special keys that we might still find useful today, but that didn't make it to the PC or Mac at the time.

For example, the late 1980s Sun Type-4 keyboard:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jgrove/3051883468/

A 1984 Apollo workstation:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/mwichary/2288724329/

My later HP workstation had a cute "delete line" key. (Which I was very happy to bind as a new Emacs user, though I soon found that Emacs could have smarter commands that meant I didn't need "delete line" much at all.)

As much as there was a time that I loved the idea of the Sun special keys, today I work exclusively from laptop-like TrackPoint keyboards, and I'd actually like to remove some special keys: the Win95 keys between Ctrl and Alt, which I've found window management uses for, but make it harder to hit the right Ctrl or Alt modifier than it used to be. And I'd get rid of the ThinkPad Fn key on that era of keyboard I still use.

My daily driver keyboard is a Sun Type 7 USB, mostly because I find these keys amusing. A fair number can be made to work with a little effort. It was very useful when I sprained my left pinky finger, making ctrl-c and others difficult.

For example: https://www.ebay.com/itm/144594997129?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid...

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.

Move is a far better term than cut.

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.

Not really, because you can paste multiple times from cut (except in Excel).

A film from Xerox demonstrating the Xerox Star UI from back in the day:

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.

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.

The keyboard has such a satisfying "clunk" sound. It puts my Cherry Blues to shame.

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

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

Some would say AR is a commercial innovation in computer interfaces. (I'm not one of them, but I think it's worth mentioning...)

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).

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

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

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

The keyboard key is very meta.

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

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.

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

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.

Works well though. I wouldn't want tab characters in my text fields.

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.

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.

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.

Two hands to delete a character? No, thanks. Not to mention that your consistency argument is out the window because Apple doesn't put Fn in the same place on all its keyboards.

Also, that combo isn't marked on the keyboards, so it may as well not exist for the vast majority of people.

With the demise of the Eject key, there is no excuse for the lack of Delete on Apple laptops. Not to mention that Apple put a hardware delay on the Eject key for some reason, so you couldn't even remap it to be Delete. If accidental CD ejections were causing enough fatalities to demand a NON-DEFEATABLE DELAY, why didn't Apple simply make Eject a secondary function on a Delete key, requiring Fn (and being marked as such)? Both problems solved.

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

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