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Aucbvax.2434 fa.works utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!works Sat Jul 25 09:41:23 1981 Sperry Univac workstation design group -- eyewitness testimony >From SHRAGE@WHARTON-10 Sat Jul 25 09:38:52 1981 I was invited to Sperry's Software Research group and had an opportunity to speak with them and examine some of the work that they are doing in workstations and in programmer's tools. They are more concerned with the "programmer's workstation" than a management workstation and thus are putting a lot of effort into the language that controls the device. It is designed to be modified by the user and has inboard multitasking and file system, etc. Understand that this design is for a device to be hung from a large central machine for program developement NOT for execution of programs. Here is a short list of the things that (I saw) that they were thinking about/working on:

1) Pascal debugging/programming aids. They have a really nice design (and partial implementation) for a visual program stepper that draws colored boxes around the program structure and then highlights the lines as they are executed so that the programmer can "see" the program in exectution. It (will) also display the variables and structure nicely. I played with this and it made it very very simple to visualize what a program was doing (especially when you turn the speed up fast enough and can see where the loops are crunching along). The final implementation of this should be very nice. [Jim Gimple (formerly a Snobol afficianado from Bell) is doing this work].

2) A high res/color PWB system with joystick and mouse. They are spending a lot of time working on the "editor language" (which is also the JCL and workstation control language) rather than "cutsie" features to add to the user view. The file structure is Unix based but they ALSO feel that unix's user view is a total lose and are designing one of their own that, from what I saw, will be much nicer. Again, their position is that this will be used by programmers, not managers or secretaries and they are giving the user power to change things (in a properly controlled manner) at whim without too much work. Currently they are having trouble with the Univac hardware research people (it's too slow for them) but that should be resolved soon. This project is under control of Marc Fogel and Ira Ruben.

3) Help systems. Knoweldge based and natural language driven (if you like) user aids for the station command language etc. They have several NL and AI people very interested in user assitance. I don't know how/if this relates to the workstation but it was interesting none-the-less. This work was being done by Nathan Relles and Norm Sondheimer (president of the ACL).

All of the above is managed in a very small group of very expert people by Dick Wexelblat and for more info one can write to

Sperry Univac Software Research 2G3 Bluebell, Penna. 19424

They are going to have an Apollo and/or a couple of Perqs soon.

-- Jeff

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