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Aucbvax.2190 fa.works utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!works Thu Jul 9 05:13:28 1981 Unfinished tasks, intra-office mail, and system death >From LLOYD@MIT-AI Thu Jul 9 05:09:47 1981 An interesting point was made about the necessity of being able to conveniently hand-off a task to another person. Certainly it would be simple to just dump the task's parameters from RAM to disk and restore them again elsewhere. While technically feasable (I have done that on my CT system to provide task interruption capability), this is tantamount to scooping up the mess on your desk and dumping it on someone else's. In any case the user is probably going to reorganize it somewhat in order to make a smooth transition. Given this, I don't think that special capabilities need to be created to meet this "need" (I know that those of you using large central machines may have dificulty with my technique depending on system architechture).

As far as intra-office mail for phone messages is concerned, I am all for it. I dislike being told that "there has been a phone message waiting at the operators desk for you for several hours. Why don't you ever pick up your messages ..." especially since I have been waiting for the call and I happened to be away from my desk for two minutes when it came. Paper doesn't hack it here.

There are some tasks that are very painful if you lose your work because of system death and others that are unimportant. If I have been editing a document for hours and I lose it all because of a system crash, I am going to be VERY annoyed. On the other hand, if I am reading my mail and the system goes down, it will not be very painful for me to recover from that situation. We are going to have to do serious study as to which tasks can be recovered easily.

Convergent has come up with what I believe is a unique method of protecting a user from a crash during an editing session. All user keystrokes and the original document are maintained through an editing session. If the system dies or I wish to go back in time in my editing session, I can do a replay and watch the system duplicate my editing session in short order. This is an interesting approach and I have found it to be VERY useful (like the time someone pulled my plug when I was four hours into an editing session ... ).

Brian

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