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Aucbvax.2149 fa.works utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!works Tue Jul 7 09:42:24 1981 Re: Spatial design for a workstation >From cfh@CCA-UNIX Tue Jul 7 09:40:04 1981 In response to your message of Sun Jul 5 14:23:05 1981:

We built a system here for ARPA which incorporates some of the facilities you describe in your scenario.

The system consists of a number of intelligent (8080-based) terminals hooked up at 9600 baud to a PDP-11/70 running Unix. The screen provides a window into a data surface which contains icons of various shapes. The outlines of the icons are made up of standard printing characters.

The user can scroll the data surface by pressing an arrow key (8 are provided to allow diagonal motion) or an outboard joy stick.

The icons are user-defined and can correspond to any program runnable under Unix. To run the program, the user centers its icon on the screen and presses an "activate" button. Typically, the program to be run is the Ned (Rand ->BBN) display editor editing some file.

The user can return to the top level via either of two buttons - "deactivate" or "detach". The "detach" button suspends the program and causes the icon to blink. When the user again activates that button, the screen is restored to its previous state. I agree that it would have been better to make "detach" the standard mode, but this was not practical under Unix with the implementation approach that we had chosen.

We haven't tried the system in an actual office environment. Programmers found it cumbersome because there was always a Unix command that didn't yet have an icon, and they already knew most of the command names anyway. It usually took more time to scroll to the icon than to type its name. People always enjoy the demo however, and we are still looking for a place to try it out.

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