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Comment by knuckleheadsmif | Hacker News Reader

Fyi, some of those photos are much later than 1981. I wrote added the Arabic/Hebrew support to the Star document editor which probably was about 1984 and showed in one of the photos. I was still in college in 1981 so that could not have been the year.

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Thank you for all of your comments on this article. Getting so see high-quality images of this foundational artifact of modern computing was a pleasant enough surprise on its own. Getting actual historical commentary from someone who worked on the product is amazing.

You already answered most of the questions I had, but do you remember how it managed multiple character sets? I'm especially curious about how it supported Japanese Kanji, given how many characters that has. Some quick searching suggests maybe it was XCCS[1]? I had no idea that Xerox was so far ahead of their time that they invented a sort of proto-Unicode when many computers didn't even support lowercase letters.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Character_Code_Standard

Edit: fixed typo

It was XCCS (Xerox Character Code Standard) which is really the predecessor to Unicode. Both initially were 16 but character code spaces (Unicode was later extended) and Unicode developed by many of the same folks in Unison with Apple.

I was at one time on the XCCS committee and involved with Unicode development before it was called Unicode when I was at Both Xerox and Apple.

A lot of the Japanese feathers were developed with Fuji Xerox, namely vertical text support but the typing method virtually keyboard support was done by the international team headed by Joe Becker who was the Architect of all the multilingual stuff.

Albert in his comment preceded my involvement some trust what he says about earlier development over what I remember.

I was also part of it, even earlier than Mr. Knucklehead. I made it into "true fiction" in Inventing the Future (https://www.albertcory.io/inventing-the-future).

I didn't deal directly with the Kanji, but Fuji Xerox sent quite a few of their engineers over to help. They played on our softball team.

Also, the date in the email application seems to indicate 1984.

The one from https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-star-... , right? "15 May 84".

Also, https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-star-... shows the date as "Tuesday May 15", which occurred in 1984 but not 1981.

Further down it has a window with "9-Feb-84", consistent with this being from 1984.

And https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-star-... has date from 1983.

Which matches my comment about the Arabic text. These images are all from different times/release is my guess.

I looked more closely at the email and realized I know most of the folks who sent those messages.

you should let bruce know

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