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Aucbvax.1620 fa.apollo utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!DREIFU@WHARTON-10 Thu Jun 11 06:48:30 1981 Preliminary results from the personal workstations survey Below is a condensed version of the various systems that people have made an attempt to respond to. The interesting point(s) that I have noticed are:

o Everyone's view of Personal Workstations is different.

o The machine(s) selected are wide ranged and apparently well suited for each application chosen.

o There is no wrong Personal Workstation machine.

o The technology of Personal Workstations is not well established as of yet.

o There is a demonstrated need for this technology, it appears to be one year away from general use.

o Most have:

Large address space (or VM). Networking capabilities. Very good display hardware. Large local storage capacity. Micro-processor based. Contain an external locator type input device.

o Most are missing:

Software tools to round out system. Market recognition. Gateway access, no gateway specifications. Too many parts, development schedules are full, revision schedules are bare. Consistency. This is a result of different definitions of what a personal workstation is supposed to be.

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Below is a summary of the survey responses. Eventually, each machine will be examined in greater detail. The intention is to educate ourselves about personal workstations. They sound neat, but what they are under the surface is still a hot topic.

Machine Reason/Use Comments ___________________________________________________________________

Perq Spice Project 15

Spice means: Scientific Personal Integrated Computing Environment. ___________________________________________________________________

Jericho BBN - Lisp machines 30 need large address space and powerful LISP processing. ___________________________________________________________________

CTI For Alanthus. 16 workstations per cluster capability. (no numbers) ___________________________________________________________________

DEC-20/Ts computer Large Scale OA proj. 20

Interesting for discussion purposes. ___________________________________________________________________

Apollo Test/soft devt. 2 - max curr config. existing in field ___________________________________________________________________

Xerox Xerox Corp devt. 50-60 MIT, and others: experimentation. ___________________________________________________________________

Nu's MIT Workstation 15-25 prototype ___________________________________________________________________

Wang WPS-25 Experiment 1-4 ___________________________________________________________________

Extending the survey:

Each technical group that has a machine; eg Xerox PARC, please designate one person to introduce their machine(s) with references in the literature. For each agency or sponsored group, list the application and the reasons and any other relevant information about their specific problem, eg: general Office Management, or some application. This should provide a good beginning in opening the discussions.

Henry Dreifus DREIFUS@WHARTON-10

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