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Aucbvax.1690 fa.apollo utzoo!duke!mhtsa!eagle!ucbvax!DREIFU@WHARTON-10 Fri Jun 12 22:49:37 1981 Workstations, and their posts. User interface, how important?

The Apollo has nothing right at the moment, as compared to the Star, in which almost the total software engineering effort has been skewed.

Building a powerful user interface is ''nice'', but what is left with respect to processor cycles is not so ''nice''. The questions of priorities for any given application is not clear.

Example: o Personal workstations are purchased because; (a) Small application program needs to be run off mainframe (b) Office - management systems need more sophistication (c) Need for specialized computing has grown (d) Corporations can no longer shell out vast sums of money on computing, when distributing is available.

o What personalities should personal workstations have?

In answering this, there are basically 2, a truely split personality:

Consider:

System FOO runs on giant IBM-303x and can really be run on lots of distributed perscoms [from G. Steckel].

Systems people would like to see a very interactive and totally controllable system, perhaps right down to the micro-code. The full power, memory management right through to the disk-I/O routines. Engineering a product right is as equivalent to engineering it well.

Management would want to see just the pretty pictures, the finished product, none of the rough edges, that the software engineers love to play with. All they want is a black box with none of the 'hassles' of low level code.

A split personality indeed.

Most systems are geared towards the management. The fact that few provisions have been made for the systems types is indeed a potential tragedy. Much of the insulation is hindering a good job for the programmer. Remember these things are nothing more powerful than your Apple computer, doing a major application in-efficiently will hurt the perscoms in the long run.

Opinions?

/Hank

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