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CED in the History of Media Technology

The Xerox Star 8010 was a commercial refinement of the company's in-house Alto and featured a mouse-controlled graphical user interface or GUI as opposed to the keyboard-controlled text interface common on computers at that time. Announced in April 1981, the machine was also designed to share data over an Ethernet network. But sales were dismal, as less expensive non-networked computers were gaining popularity at that time, and the GUI gave the impression of being very slow in comparison to a text interface. It wasn't until the low-priced Macintosh came out in 1984 that the GUI achieved popularity, which increased even more with the release of Windows 3.0 in 1990.