Aucb.156

Aucb.156
fa.editor-p
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!C70:editor-people
Thu Dec 10 11:29:21 1981
Update to request for references on non-textual editing
>From FURUTA@WASHINGTON Thu Dec 10 11:26:53 1981
[ Moderator's note: due to problems with the SCORE mailer, mailing list
members may have received junk mail (addressed to SIG-GROG), or may end
up receiving two copies of this message. The problems have now been
corrected; sorry for any inconvenience they have caused! s/JQJ ]

A few weeks back, I sent a request to the list asking for references
people might have on non-textual (computer based) editing systems.
Responses were not as great as I had hoped but I will summarize the
information I have received to this date. Further information is
welcome and desired. If anything further is sent to me, I will
prepare an update to this message.
*******************
I received a number of messages describing Bell Labs' speech editing
system. In essence, this system seems to automate the manual steps
normally taken in editing tape recordings. Speech is stored on a
disk. A terminal with added function keys is used to specify
operations like: "Mark a segment of text", "Delete the segment",
"Insert text", etc. Various speech compression techniques are
available for use in quickly scanning already recorded text. This
system is described by N. F. Maxemchuk in Bell Sys. Tech. J., vol. 59,
#8, pp. 353-355. Bob Allen of Bell Labs adds:
--------------
|Within a few days I should have a publicly available report on the
|human factors of this system and a discussion of user-interface issues
|in speech editors generally. I will be happy to send out copies of
|this report.
| Bob Allen (allegra!rba)
| 7A-221
| Bell Labs
| Murray Hill, NJ 07974
--------------
Thanks also to Jim Hook (Jgh.Cornell@UDel) and Hilary Wilder
(allegra!haw) for information on this system.
*******************
I also heard of a similar system, produced by IBM:
--------------
|Date: 12 Nov 1981 0917-PST
|From: Frank da Cruz <G.DACRUZ AT SU-SCORE>
|To: Furuta at WASHINGTON
|
|IBM has an editor for recorded messages; they've just announced it as
|a product -- it's in all the trade publications. I saw it a few years ago
|in Yorktown Heights when they were working on it. Basically, you speak into
|a touch-tone phone, mark things (like sentences, paragraphs) by pushing
|buttons on the phone, and when you've finished, you can review and "edit"
|your message (by pushing buttons that refer to marked things) before
|sending it off. At the time, I believe they also had some way of looking
|at the messages from their computer terminals; certainly not the contents,
|but maybe at the to, from, and cc lists, length, status, etc.
--------------
*******************
There were a number of systems which I had hoped to hear about but did
not. Included in this list are the Xerox systems for picture
manipulation (e.g., Markup and Draw on the Alto) and newer versions of
similar systems. If people have pointers on these and related
systems, I'd like to know about them.

Another interesting system which I didn't hear about is Mockingbird,
an interactive music editor, written by John Maxwell and Severo
Ornstein, both at Parc. I did find a description of the system on the
MIT bulletin board:
--------------
|MOCKINGBIRD (written at Xerox by MIT's John Maxwell) exploits the
|high-performance Dorado personal computing system to provide composers
|with an advanced tool. Interactive graphics (using standard music
|notation), an organ keyboard, and sound help the composer develop the
|piece from initial experiments through the finished composition.
--------------
Mockingbird is described in John Maxwell's M.S. thesis, available for
$25(!) from MIT. I found this to be a particularly interesting system
as it seems to make computer editing available to music composers
without requiring that they learn a new set of conventions in order to
use the system. I believe that the most successful user interfaces
(although probably not the most powerful ones) are those which remain
the closest to the historical ways (i.e., non-computer ways) of
performing the task.

--Rick
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