Desktop metaphor and windows (Xerox Star)
Metáfora del escritorio y ventanas (Xerox Star)
- Date
- 1981 · confidence high
- Place
- Xerox, Palo Alto, California, United States
- Credited to
- David Canfield Smith, Charles Irby and the Xerox Star team
- People
- 👤 Alan Kay1940–
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What it is
The first commercial product with a desktop of document icons, folders, printers and a wastebasket, based on the idea that the user manipulates familiar objects. Too expensive to succeed, it fixed the visual vocabulary of computing.
What it led to
- Macintosh (1984) and Windows (1985)
- Interaction design as a discipline
- File and folder metaphors in the cloud and on mobile
Built on
- Smalltalk and object-oriented programming1972-1980
- Graphical user interface (Xerox Alto)1973
- Xerox Alto graphical interface