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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