Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!PEPKE%FSU.MFENET@NMFECC.ARPA
From: PEPKE%FSU.MFENET@NMFECC.ARPA
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hypercard
Subject: RE: Something HyperCard *OUGHT* to do
Message-ID: <51813@sun.uucp>
Date: 3 May 88 19:54:12 GMT
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Distribution: comp
Lines: 33
Approved: hyper-hackers%plaid@sun.com

> One of the most severe problems with the Mac is that every program
> assumes it is interacting with a human being.  It is virtually
> impossible to get two programs to communicate or cooperate in a
> significant way, an ability that every UNIX-hacker takes for granted.
> There is no facility in Mac-land that has anything like the power and
> notational convenience of a pipe, or the flexibility of shell
> programming.

Paul Haeberli of Silicon Graphics did some work in this area.  He put out a
paper called "A Data Flow Manager for Interactive Somethingorother" or
something like that.  What he basically had was a way of linking windows
on the screen of an IRIS workstation to each other, where the linking
had a visual paradigm that looked like diagrams and menus laid over the windows
on the desktop.  The example application was fairly simple: a program that
displayed a picture from a geometry file.  Into this one package he linked
a color editor, a transformation control panel, and a simple animation
controller that could record a series of transformations and play them
back into the window.  He also had a renderer which would take the geometry
from one window and a pattern from another and do the rendering.

The approach he used involved having the processes communicate with each
other through a mutually agreed upon protocol.  This is obviously the hard
part: to design the protocol to be complete enough that it does everything
that needs doing.

Eric Pepke                           pepke%fsu.mfenet@nmfecc.arpa
Supercomputer Computations           pepke%scri.hepnet@lbl-csa2.arpa
   Research Institute                pepke%fsu.bitnet@wiscvm.wisc.edu
Florida State University             "You're living in your own private Idaho
Tallahassee, FL 32306-4052            On the ground like a wild potato."

Disclaimer: My employers seldom even LISTEN to my opinions.
Meta-disclaimer: Any society that needs disclaimers has too many lawyers.