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Mon Jan 18 15:06:13 1982
WorkS Digest V2 #6
>From JSOL@USC-ECLB Fri Jan 15 03:30:44 1982
Works Digest Friday, 15 Jan 1982 Volume 2 : Issue 6
Today's Topics: RFC - Book Layout
Food For Thought - WorkStations Query
Query Replies (a few of them) - What Is A WorkStation
Laser Printer - Based On The SUN Board
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 14 Jan 1982 (Thursday) 1019-EDT
From: DREIFU at WHARTON-10 (Henry Dreifus)
Subject: Possible layout for Workstations book: comments?
PERSONAL COMPUTER WORKSTATIONS
Chapter 1: What is a Personal Workstation
- General Introduction
- Its impact
- List the components, brief description
Chapter 2: Management & Economics of PWS (Maybe 2 chapters)
- Why there is a trend towards PWS's
- Where they belong, their function
- What they should NOT be used for
- Advantages, incremental growth, dist'd topologically
- Costs, what they are worth, how much should one pay for a PWS
- What makes a WS a justifiable expenditure
- Businesses of the future
- New management styles
- Other changes due to PWS's
Chapter 3: Expectations
- Hardware, limited capabilities; it is not a mainframe
- Software, it will be much better
- What a PWS will and will not do
- Misconceptions
Chapter 4: [POSSIBLE] Design of a PWS
- What does one need in a PWS
- What NOT to put in a PWS
- Expansion considerations
- Reliability of WS, needs for new kinds of procedures
for PWS's (archiving, backup, security, location)
Chapter 5: Distributed Systems & Local Networks [could be 2 chapters]
- Definition
- How they work
- Architecture
- BroadBand, Baseband, what can one put on a BBN
- What constitutes a distributed envr. Why does one need one
- Problems, management & other babble w/dist sys. (concurrency)
Chapter 6: Connecting up a PWS
- Interface considerations, problems
- Lack of Standards, types of communications, modes, bandwidth
- Gateways
- What does one attach to a PWS? How to set up a PWS
in an envr, some example(s).
- +'s and -'s of networks, what kinds: Broad v. Base band
- Other devices, Laser Beam Printers, special devices
Chapter 7: The User Interface
- Display Managers
- Personalization
- User-oriented devices, representations.
- Heterogeneous environments
- User environments ]
- Programmer environments ] their needs
Chapter 8: The Workstation's Next Step
- Now that we've got them, what else can they do for us
- Training considerations
- How do we "use" the workstation
- Office of the Future
- Engineering for the future (throw away drafting
introduce CAD)
- Impact of the WS
DESCRIPTION
PERSONAL COMPUTER WORKSTATIONS, tentative title, will be a book aimed
at the technical and management market. Introducing Personal
Workstations, defining some of the terms, identifying problems that
exist, the goal is a leading edge informative book, from which a
manager will understand what personal workstations can accomplish and
how they can best be utilized in his environment.
------------------------------
Date: Thursday, 14 January 1982 11:06-EST
From: DPR at MIT-XX
Subject: questions I'd like to answer
Generally, I find myself bored with the content of WorkS. THus, to
spice it up let me ask some questions that I care about.
1. Rather than worrying about chips I care about the packaging of
those chips into workstations. What are the best 68000 based products
people have seen out now that so many are being announced (Computex,
Dual, Wicat, Charles River Data Systems, BBN's BitGraph...)?
2. Is a multi-processor workstation a good idea (for dynamic graphics,
for example)? Adding additional hardware processors with shared
memory doesn't seem to add much to hardware cost, so why has no one
done it?
3. I hypothesize that sound output on a workstation is cute, but a
terrible product idea (in shared offices, it is annoying...). For
similar reasons sound input is a problem. Is there a good use for
sound in an office?
4. How do you train users of winchester-based systems to do proper
backup so that they don't lose everything the first time their disk
fails? Is there a technical solution (require a local net with a
backup server?)
5. There seem to be two distinct design points for workstations
regarding theeir communications environment -- either they are always
connected to a net and always listening (for mail, e.g.), or they are
only connected when the user is running a communications appl. (such
as FTP or fetching mail from a mail drop server). Each is workable,
but system usability, hardware design requirements (e.g., to always be
listeening requires a kind of "personal timesharing system"), network
technology (ehternet vs. digital pabx) are all affected by the choice
of design point. Can anyone comment on their experience with one
choice or the other; is one clearly better? is one cheaper?
David
------------------------------
Date: 13 Jan 1982 00:10:42-PST
From: pratt@Shasta at Sumex-Aim
Subject: asc answered (again)
To answer yet another asc question:
What is a workstation? I haven't a clue, making me suspect it is the
wrong question. So I'll change the question to "Where should
computing resources be located, and at what time granularity and
community size should they be shared?" Without going into great
detail, here's an institutional answer based on today's prices and
performance figures.
Processors and main memory should go on the user's desk, in a corner
of the box that the display goes in. Secondary memory should consist
of perhaps 150 megabytes shared by 5-10 users, connected say by one
Ethernet. Tertiary memory is harder to pin down, but might consist of
a few gigabytes shared by 100 users. Printers (which should of course
be laser printers) should be shared by one floor's worth of people -
it is a pain to have to retrieve printouts from another floor.
This is the model on which the Sun workstation design has been based.
The design gets its economical leverage (a) by respecting this model,
and (b) by parsimonious implementation.
For noninstitutional users effective sharing is much more awkward to
arrange, putting at a disadvantage anyone who needs to use a computer
at home, whether or not they also have access to a computer at work.
Either much cheaper memory, or much higher bandwidth communication
with shared resources, will alleviate this problem. Of the two,
better communications is the better solution, one reason being that
software you can really benefit from is not the sort of thing you
generally want to be maintaining on your own, even if you have a 100
megabyte disk to maintain it on.
The above pretty much circumscribes "the system." If you can do
better than this you are either a hobbyist (no slight intended, I am
both a computer hobbyist and a ham - VK2AUA - myself) or are willing
to settle for less than productive computing resources. Don't forget
to figure in the value of your time when calculating the cost of lost
productivity. Also don't forget that "usable" computers and memories
are getting pretty cheap - we hope to get the Sun workstation design
down to $1500 worth of parts including packaging within the next year
or two, to bring the retail cost down to well under $5000.
Vaughan Pratt
------------------------------
Date: 12 Jan 1982 11:55:34-PST
From: decvax!yale-comix!ima!johnl at Berkeley
From: John R. Levine
From: The INTERACTIVE Electric Calculator Co., Cambridge MA.
Subject: SUN workstation
Friends at Yale just got a nifty laser printer that is based on a SUN
board. Contrary to earlier claims, no paging. Perhaps they're just
waiting for the 68010 and 68020.
------------------------------
Date: 14 January 1982 01:23-EST
From: Robert Elton Maas <REM MIT-MC AT>
Subject: WorkStations?
To: CROM at MIT-AI
90% of what a programmer does at his terminal is editing (modifying
and viewing) text (source programs, documentation of programs,
expository articles about research, electronic mail). Thus a
workstation should be defined as something that can do this 90%
totally locally and call up a network for the rest.
100% of what a secretary or publisher does is editing text (financial
data, correspondence, articles). Thus a workstation should be defined
as something that can do all this and then send the result out to the
postal service (correspondence) or the printing press (articles).
------------------------------
Date: 14 January 1982 05:25-EST
From: Frank J. Wancho <FJW MIT-MC AT>
Subject: What's a WorkStation
Seems to me that the definition is a function of the kind of work that
needs to be done. For the most part, the recent discussion centers
around S&E applications programming as the work - and there are those
who will say, won't a relatively dumb terminal connected to a super
mainframe do the job...
But, there are other kinds of work stations that are not being
discussed here, and maybe should be.
One is the manager's work station. He's the one who wants to query
locally shared databases (through a local net) as well as some piece
of much larger databases elsewhere. He also wants to draw
plots/graphs of the extracted data, both on the screen and occassional
hardcopy, maybe at times, in color, for a report or presentation. He
also wants to write draft reports, papers, and corespondence to have
his secretary cleanup (format) and print - and maybe even send to
someone else (via electronic means).
Another is the office manager's work station. Mostly what the office
secretary will use to prepare "paper" work and correspondence for
inter-office and inter- and intra-site delivery... the first step
toward the "paperless" office.
And the last one of interest (to my people) is the project engineer's
work station. His is the combination of all of the above, although
the programming requirements are more routine, such as massaging data
to prepare technical reports. Like the manager, he also needs to
access the large databases to prepare his reports too...
And all these somewhat different types of work stations need to
communicate with each other and the outside world - and for a total
cost of less than $5K per user - not $10-$30K... And do all of that
today (with whatever's currently available, as an interim off-the-self
solution that is not self-obsolescent), maybe tomorrow (*if* there is
something really better and cheaper worth waiting for).
Now, we have some ideas along those lines and we need to know if we've
overlooked somethings in either the choice of the hardware or the
choice of the software (operating system). Given that most of the
WorkS discussions have been rather highly technical and leaning
heavily toward the kind of work station that supports mainly heavy S&E
applications programming, am I alone and maybe in the wrong discussion
group?
--Frank
------------------------------
Date: 14 January 1982 2049-EST (Thursday)
From: George.Coulouris at CMU-10A
Subject: What is a workstation?
Given that we want personal machines that offer a natural and
convenient user interface for all of the information handling tasks
that we and other, possibly more naive, users want to do, I believe
that we can derive some important consequences. A natural user
interface to any reasonably sophisticated task must contain a visual
representation of the state of the task as it progresses. If the task
is complex, the visual representation needs to be quite rich in order
to represent its state. It is for this reason that high-resolution
displays have become so popular, not because all workstations are used
for typesetting, vlsi design, or any other specific interactive
graphical purpose.
The visual representation needs to change in real time, so that it
constitutes a 'window onto the state of the application'. For many
applications, this involves animation-like image generation, *directly
from the application data structures*. It therefore follows that the
application program that manages the application data structures
should run in the workstation, so that the data structures are
available to the 'animation process'. I am therefore led to the
conclusion that a workstation must have sufficient resources to
execute a very large proportion of the interactive tasks its users
wish to perform, leaving only non-interactive and very infrequently
used software to run in other kinds of computer system. Of course, the
workstation programs may call upon other stations to perform services
(shared file access, printing, mailing, etc) but the state of the task
has to stored in the workstation if a smoothly integrated interactive
environment is to be achieved. This leads me to the further
conclusion that workstations need as many of the architectural
features that have been found really useful in current machines as we
can afford to put into them, so that they can run the application
software well. In addition, they need extra hardware support for the
screen in order to achieve the above mentioned smooth animation.
George Coulouris
(Computer Systems Laboratory, Queen Mary College, London)
------------------------------
End of WorkS Digest
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