Taking on Big Blue: The First Attempt to Free Computers from the Mainframe

Challenge
Before Macintosh, there were icons and pull-down menus and the mouse. Before Windows, before everybody, there was a GUI (graphical user interface). Xerox had them all on the 8010 Star and the 860 workstation in a system that included Ethernet, file servers and distributed processing, and they wanted to introduce it to corporate America.

Solution
In 1982, the Xerox TOP (Transforming Office Productivity) Seminar toured 37 cities. The event included 1100 slides, seven multi-image modules and five video modules with a 25-minute film threaded through the six-hour script, all designed to help financial and information-management executives understand the breakthrough concept Xerox was offering.

Result
Though Xerox's concepts were right on, the product line didn't succeed. Each workstation was priced at over $18,000 and the executives targeted for the product weren't yet ready to learn to type. Still, much of what Steven Jobs glimpsed during his brief visit to PARC (Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center) in 1981 has become part of our daily lives.

All the elements of the TOP Seminar were designed for and presented on one of the very early two-sided interactive video disks. Every chapter and, indeed, frame was accessible by the presenters, and many of the questions now being confronted and resolved by designers of today's interactive web sites were challenges we surmounted then. www.xerox.com (The Glyn Group)