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Aucbvax.2189 fa.works utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!works Thu Jul 9 04:40:44 1981 Re: Contexts as Icons >From obrien@RAND-UNIX Thu Jul 9 04:36:48 1981 I hadn't really thought about this before, but the PLATO computer-based education system does exactly this - it saves state between terminal sessions. It does this only for students, though, not for "authors" (programmers). I hadn't thought of it before because PLATO is so strange that I really don't think of it in terms of other computer systems.

State-saving works but can't be done blindly. It turns out that almost all real applications ("lessons") require the author to do his own state-saving so that the student doesn't come up with no context, but is instead presented with a higher-level frame that tells him where he was and presents some options. Only blind drill-and-practice stuff can use full state-saving at all usefully, and sometimes not even then.

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