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Aucbvax.2114 fa.works utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!works@mit-ai Sun Jul 5 09:42:13 1981 Switching tasks and context >From JWALKER@BBNA Sun Jul 5 09:34:06 1981 I don't follow the relevance of all this talk about "state diagrams" in the discussion of resuming a suspended activity. The human side of resuming something involves answering the question "Now, where was I?". One very effective answer to that question is the screen display of the task as it was when you left it. (It is perhaps not the best answer, but the best answer involves some meta-knowledge of what you thought you were doing and your intentions for the various commands you had used. I am willing to assume that someone can recognize what they were doing given the set of commands they had issued before stopping work.)

I concur that the approach taken by the LISP machine and other multi-window systems (that keep track of various process objects and reinstate their displays when the objects are selected) is correct. These systems typically provide two ways of picking up a dropped ball -- by using a mouse to select one of the objects whose window is currently visible on the screen, and by using a mouse to select an object from a menu window that contains a brief description of each of the objects. The menu gives you complete context for "where was I?" by showing all of things you are juggling. This is very important because the fewer details you have to keep in your head about what you are doing, the more head is left over for actually getting the work done...

Simply resuming a dropped activity should not be a problem solving activity ("now, let's see, I think I had that running as a kept fork under Hermes, which is running as a kept fork under EMACS..."). The "multi-forking" TOPS-20 execs that exist at several places (e.g. MIT, Stanford, Rutgers) also support users who need to move "sideways" to do a task although TOPS-20 doesn't provide anything in the way of reinstating the display context.

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