Another piece of the Xerox Alto and Star History

As the STAR became known within Xerox's Engineering community as a workstation with bit-mapped graphics, a mouse, menus, and icons.  There was one group called Xerox's E.I.S. group, who took the STAR platform and developed several CAD/CAM packages for it. The Xerox E.I.S. group under a re-organization was to report in to a Xerox subsidiary called Versatec.  Versatec was know mostly for their great eletrostatic plotters that were used on large CAD/CAD systems, like Intergraph, Calma, Computer Vision, Auto-trol, Unigraphics,  Cadem, Catia, Daisy, Mentor, ECAD, SDA, Cadence, AutoCad, and many many others, so the match seem like natural fit.  Most of the CAD systems sold at the time were "turn key" so when you bought  a system you pretty much got everything, from the computer hardware, to the CAD software, down to the plotter.  A good history of CAD can be found at  http://mbinfo.mbdesign.net/CAD-History.htm .

The Versatec E.I.S. Expert was Announced to the Market Place in 1984 with CAD tools for Drafting (Expert Drafting) and Drawing (Expert Illustrator). At the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in June of 1985 the Expert Engineer package was added to the product to support Electronics' design automation (EDA) market.  As with the Star, this product never really took off in the market, and the organizational match within Xerox put Versatec at odds with all of its major OEM's.  It was dis-continued in about  1988. 


By comparison most other CAD system environments at the time were basic and did not have the advanced windowing and networking capabilities as the Xerox Expert did.  I don't think many customers really understood the value of a networked CAD workstation.   Not until the mid to late 80's did companies like  Sun Microsystems, Apollo Computer, HP and even the IBM began making cost effective networked workstations that these CAD vendors could port their software to.   Sun lead the way with built in TCP/IP and a basic core belief that "The Network was the Computer".  The days of turnkey CAD systems went away, a better cheep way became available.  And of course there is the whole IBM x86 PC story. 

The above information was documented by Bill Harper, a former employee of Versatec Division of Xerox.