At first, only a few Altos were built.[1] Although by 1979 nearly 1,000 Ethernet-linked Altos were in use at Xerox and another 500 at collaborating universities and government offices,[2] it was never intended to be a commercial product.[3] 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. When the resulting Xerox Star system was announced in 1981,[2] the cost was about $75,000 ($211,000 in today's dollars) for a basic system, and $16,000 ($45,000 today) for each added workstation.