Aucbvax.2149
fa.works
utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!works
Tue Jul  7 09:42:24 1981
Re: Spatial design for a workstation
>From cfh@CCA-UNIX Tue Jul  7 09:40:04 1981
In response to your message of Sun Jul  5 14:23:05 1981:

We built a system here for ARPA which incorporates
some of the facilities you describe in your scenario.

The system consists of a number of intelligent (8080-based)
terminals hooked up at 9600 baud to a PDP-11/70 running
Unix.  The screen provides a window into a data surface
which contains icons of various shapes.  The outlines of
the icons are made up of standard printing characters.

The user can scroll the data surface by pressing an arrow
key (8 are provided to allow diagonal motion) or an
outboard joy stick.

The icons are user-defined and can correspond to any
program runnable under Unix.  To run the program, the
user centers its icon on the screen and presses an
"activate" button.  Typically, the program to be run
is the Ned (Rand ->BBN) display editor editing some file.

The user can return to the top level via either of two
buttons - "deactivate" or "detach".  The "detach" button
suspends the program and causes the icon to blink.  When
the user again activates that button, the screen is restored
to its previous state.  I agree that it would have been
better to make "detach" the standard mode, but this was
not practical under Unix with the implementation approach
that we had chosen.

We haven't tried the system in an actual office environment.
Programmers found it cumbersome because there was always a
Unix command that didn't yet have an icon, and they already
knew most of the command names anyway.  It usually took more
time to scroll to the icon than to type its name.  People
always enjoy the demo however, and we are still looking for
a place to try it out.



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