Xerox is not only to copy paper
In the previous post I talked about the tory of the GUI, and I gave you a small introdution about GUIs and the Sketchpad. But one of the big jumps in the graphical interfaces world has been given by Xerox when they builded the first desktop system called 8010 Star Information System in 1981. T was the first commercial system with GUI that joined various technologies and after some years we could call it by "Personal Computer". T system was awesome, displaying true bitmaps (instead of vectors like Sketchpad) in its interface. And it was the first interface that uses the concept of windows, icons, folders and menus.
The main philosophy for the construction of t interface is that should be intuitive for the end user, to be used in offices and businesses. And to do that, they used the concept of "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG).
And then, we can see a screen where there are icons and folders, each representing a kind of file (file types like images, texts, etc), where clicking on t icon, it opens a new window with content inside. Note that in the Xerox Star there are not advanced programs like image editors and word processors, but each type of document opens in its appropriate application, and nothing more.
The Xerox Star's interface follows the concept of objects, for example, in a text editor you have an object "page", the object "paragraph", "line", "word", etc and if you click on t object you invoke a range of options such as copy, paste, crop and remove. In other cases it becomes a new "options window" where you can set different properties for each kind of object.
One of innovations also includes the hight compatibility between applications, for example, if you create an graph object into a image editor, you can insert it into the text editor together your text. T ability to include different objects inside other applications was included on Microsoft Windows nine years after, in 1990, when they created the OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) based on Xerox Star concepts.
We can see the result of t incredible creation in the image below, where you can observe the different objects interacting with each other. Note the widgets, icons and windows:
