Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ncrlnk!ncrcae!ece-csc!mcnc!xanth!nic.MR.NET!tank!ncar!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!uccba!uceng!dmocsny
From: dmocsny@uceng.UC.EDU (daniel mocsny)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Hundreds of books on an optical disk
Summary: Some people like to be on the safe side...
Message-ID: <425@uceng.UC.EDU>
Date: 14 Nov 88 18:38:37 GMT
References: <0XMtqn087E-0A14EYk@andrew.cmu.edu> <344@uceng.UC.EDU> <42955@yale-celray.yale.UUCP>
Organization: Univ. of Cincinnati, College of Engg.
Lines: 31

In article <42955@yale-celray.yale.UUCP>, wald-david@CS.YALE.EDU (david wald) writes:
> In article <398@uceng.UC.EDU> dmocsny@uceng.UC.EDU (daniel mocsny) writes:
> >Wearying with her thoughts and labors, she tells her computer to
> >save her work environment.

> Explicitly saving?  What's wrong with autosave?

The advantage of fiction is that I make the rules up as I go along. So I
can easily say:

1. Of course her computer maintains a triply-redundant audit trail of
everything she has ever done. That way it can perform statistical studies
of her usage patterns, and automatically optimize its command and file
structures to suit her. She tells the computer to save simply out of
habit, the same way one's boss tells one to do the things one was hired to
do and is consequently doing already.

2. Autosave wasn't in Virtual Workstation Release 2.1a. Release 2.1b is
out, but she hasn't bothered to upgrade yet.

Dan Mocsny

p.s. to the poster who wanted references to this sort of technology,
you can start with 

``NASA's Virtual Workstation: Using Computers to Alter Reality,''
NASA Tech Briefs, July/August 1988.

Also see Scientific American's article on advanced user interfaces,
published in their special issue on computing sometime in the Fall of
1987.