Aucbvax.2163
fa.works
utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!works
Wed Jul  8 01:37:08 1981
Contexts as Icons
>From Lawrence.Butcher@CMU-10A Wed Jul  8 01:27:37 1981
  "I am sitting at my Personal Computer (terminal) in the middle of
some work and something different comes up.  I get confused."
  The solutions to this problem range from having lots of windows
on the screen to having little paper airplanes which are shot from
user to user to transmit phone numbers.
  The Star lets the user name available services by pointing to Icons.
Pointing to an Icon generates new more detailed Icons, or causes some
Icon-dependent action to happen, or causes a window to appear thru which
the user can interact with the named service.  The collection of Icons
and windows are the context within which a user does work.
  When a person services an interrupt, he would like to bundle up his
previous context and stick it somewhere.  When the interruption is taken
care of, the old context is returned to.  It is not reasonable for a
user to have to smash all of his present windows up to the upper left
side of the display to make room to work on his new context.  It is equally
unreasonable for a user to have massive piles of overlayed windows.
  A much better solution than windows would be a formal context manager
which allows you to group Icons, windows, and related running programs
into little "context" objects.  These could be manipulated just like
mail, files, and windows containing command interpreters.  One could use
the Context Manager Icon to gain access to and to manipulate lists
of contexts.
  In order to be useful these Contexts should be able to contain any
object namable by the user.  This should include Icons, instances of
running programs, and should also include the user's organization of
these objects onto his display.  A Context should also be able to
include other Contexts.
  Users commonly work on a single project for longer than a single
day.  To make this possible, Contexts must outlive terminal sessions.
They must be portable between communicating machines.  The user should
be able to move down the hall and have his work follow him.  The
Context should be available the next morning, even after orderly system
shutdown.
  Does anyone have any experience with a system like this??



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