Definitions
Chapman.ES@parc-maxc
By now you have undoubtedly read the several messages about what Mesa is. So
I am going to address your other questions.
As to the inavailablity of Mesa on Star. I do not work on Star myself, but I do
work on another product, the 5700 copier/printer, which uses Mesa to control its
operations. My understanding of the Star is that it IS primarily only a word
processor, although an extremely powerful one, at least partly because of the
capability of allowing the user to design graphics as well as text. (It also will
allow electronic mail, but this need not be much more than writing a memo and
sending it out, still conceptually within the province of a word processor.) It is
not intended that the user or any OEMs be able to change the way the station
operates, therefore, there is no need to allow Mesa to be directly accessable by
either. To you people who see the potential fun of being able to get your hands
on such a nice graphics screen and love the idea of being able to hack this
system, too bad. That's not what Xerox is selling. They really are aiming at The
Office of the Future, where executives may take a more active part in preparing
memos, reports, etc., because it has been made much easier through the facilities
of products like the Star. They are NOT interested in giving clever hackers a
new toy to play with. And, yes, Xerox probably will try to control any
customization requested by users, but will probably try to keep customization to
a minimum. The system really does try to be quite general, and suggestions for
customization will probably, if considered generally useful enough, be
incorporated into the product wholesale, that is, all costumers will get the
improvement/new feature with some subsequent release of software.
An "icon" is a small picture (generally ~1" square) which looks approximately
like the name of the icon displayed on it, i.e. a Memo icon looks like a sheet of
paper with a preset heading on it; it looks like a memo. An icon is selected and
expanded so that you then have a blank form on your screen already to be filled
out and become a memo, which can then be distributed. The purpose of icons is
to serve as a visual menu. You can see what facilities are available to you (i.e.
file server, printer, memo, report, graph, etc.) and select those that you need for
the particular task at hand, either singly or in groups, and deselect them when
you don't need them anymore. It allows you several different windows into a
variety of services, but they don't all have to be "full-size" all the time.
Hope this information is useful.
Cheryl