A Brief Telling of the story of the Elixir Products (original) (raw)

See also video of the Elixir products in action on DigiBarn TV!
Products Built by Bruce Damer with major design input from Ed Regan, Kevin Laracey, Bill Boyd, customers, Xerox and many others
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All three of Bruce's Xerox/Elixir products from 1989 Xerox Brochure

These products could all run on an original 640K IBM PC/AT system, driving 120 DPI monitors from Sigma Designs. They were built with the GEM (Graphical Environment Manager) from Digital Research (creator of CP/M) and ran as a full graphical OS application shell on top of good old DOS. The Elixir Desktop and its applications converted ordinary PCs into graphical workstations to create document jobs for large printing systems from Xerox and other manufacturers, a task the Xerox 8010 Star and Viewpoint 6085 systems failed to do.

Elixir Desktop
Elixir Desktop from Xerox brochure
Coding began: August 1988
Product to market: 1990

The Elixir desktop was and is the most successful (and one of the only surviving) direct renditions of the Xerox STAR 8010 interface. The Elixir Desktop and its associated applications were built using Borland Turbo C driving Digital Research's GEM (Graphical Environment Manager), an early PC graphical user interface platform (touted at its release in 1985 as the "Mac killer"). By opting for GEM on the original AT platform without any special cards (as were used by its competitors such as TyRego of Minneapolis MN), Elixir was assured of a smooth path porting its products to clones and taking advantage of higher speed systems as the 80s progressed. Icons were taken from Star/6085 and scaled up for the higher resolution Sigma and Wyse monitors. I built a complete windowing system and custom icons were designed by Ed Regan of Down East Technologies in Searsport Maine. Xerox Altos and me: at computer history museum
We studied the Xerox 6085, Star 8010, and Three Rivers PERQ (running the Intran MetaForm software) and Apple Macintosh systems to make our decisions in the UI sphere. I decided to implement drag and drop. The direct manipulation metaphor of object copy/move was not fully implemented but Props were. Pulldown menus on both windows and on the whole system extended beyond Star and the Macintosh. The Elixir desktop brought a desktop metaphor and suite of applications to the PC before Windows 3.0 and long before the appearance of a desktop container in Windows 95.

	ElixiGraphics

ElixiGraphics from Xerox brochure

ElixiGraphics was a powerful image editor and transformer which allowed users of a basic PC/AT platform to edit and create logos and large images for corporate document production. Shown here is an image from the Caterpillar Tractor catalogue. ElixiGraphics implemented an virtual memory system and could handle images of many megabytes on a basic 640K PC/AT.

More screen captures of ElixiGraphics/GEM in action can be seen below.

	ElixiForm

ElixiForm was the first product from Elixir, written by David Simon and Eric Searle with contributions from others. GEM-based ElixiForm was the core product of the company in the early years and like the others, was modeled after the Intran "MetaForm" software series. More screen captures of Elixiform/GEM in action can be seen below. You can see Elixiform for Windows in the next section.