Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. This section needs additional citations for verification. When the resulting Xerox Star system was announced in 1981, the cost was about $75,000 ($213,000 in today's dollars) for a basic system, and $16,000 ($46,000 today) for each added workstation.
Then in 1977, Xerox started a development project which worked to incorporate the Alto innovations into a commercial product their concept was an integrated document preparation system, centered around the (then expensive) laser printing technology and oriented towards large corporations and their trading partners. Although by 1979 nearly 1,000 Ethernet-linked Altos had been put into operation at Xerox and another 500 at collaborating universities and government offices, it was never intended to be a commercial product. At first, only a few Altos had been built. The Alto had been strongly influenced by what its designers had seen previously with NLS (at SRI) and PLATO (at University of Illinois). The first Alto became operational in 1972. The Xerox Star systems concept owes much to the Xerox Alto, an experimental workstation designed by the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).
The 8010 workstations were also sold with software based on the programming languages Lisp and Smalltalk for the smaller research and software development market. Introduced by Xerox Corporation on April 27, 1981, the name Star technically refers only to the software sold with the system for the office automation market. The Xerox Star workstation, officially named Xerox 8010 Information System, was the first commercial personal computer to incorporate technologies that have since become standard in personal computers, including a bitmapped display, a window-based graphical user interface, icons, folders, mouse (two-button), Ethernet networking, file servers, print servers, and e-mail.