After building and designing personal computers throughout the ’70s, Xerox had a breakthrough in 1981 when it unveiled Star, the first system that integrated desktop computing with various technologies that are now commonplace: a bitmapped display, a GUI (graphical user interface), icons, folders, a mouse, Ethernet networking, file servers, print servers and e-mail.
Star was ahead of its time and not commercially successful, but it was incredibly influential, setting the standard for GUIs to come from Microsoft, Apple and Sun, among others.