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Aucbvax.2184 fa.works utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!works Thu Jul 9 03:40:59 1981 Re: not putting phone messages into electronic mail files >From Deutsch@PARC-MAXC Thu Jul 9 03:37:16 1981 I have developed, and hope to publish soon, a detailed proposal for a protocol between bitmap workstations and mainframes. The protocol is probably not suitable for a 300 baud connection, but 1200 might be quite reasonable. What it demands on the terminal end is something of approximately the computing power of the present home micros -- it needs to be able to do RasterOp, some simple memory allocation, and sequential communications. It needs quite a lot of memory for the bitmap(s), but memory is getting cheaper fast. It is designed for exactly the present kind of workstation -- bitmap display, keyboard, mouse or similar pointing device.

Such a protocol is, of course, not sufficient to let you read your mail elegantly at home. What it requires is a system (hardware and software) architecture in which the mainframe is decoupled from the display. Fortunately this is a very reasonable architecture even for the present generation of workstations like the Star. If the display component and the mainframe component are located close together, the bandwidth between them will not significantly degrade responsiveness compared to the present more tightly integrated architecture.

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