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From: raveling@vaxb.isi.edu (Paul Raveling)
Newsgroups: comp.os.misc
Subject: Re: Unix bigotry
Message-ID: <7590@venera.isi.edu>
Date: 21 Feb 89 18:57:54 GMT
References: <117@spectra.COM> <692@cvbnet2.UUCP> <3101@ficc.uu.net> <7541@venera.isi.edu> <1989Feb19.143026.428@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu>
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In article <1989Feb19.143026.428@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu> woods@gpu.utcs.Toronto.EDU (Greg Woods) writes:
>
>I am, and I'm sure many others on this side of the Unix fence are,
>curious as to what you are attempting to build.

	We were working on multi-modal user interfaces that used
	a combined model- and rule-based approach to plan presentations
	and interaction modes.  A paper presented at AAAI last year
	dealt with AI aspects of the system; we presented a brief
	talk at the X Conference in January that scratched the surface
	of the software engineering issues.  The best reference to
	that would be the videotape of the conference that the X
	Consortium will release.

	BTW, I have to say "were working on" because the project's
	funding hit a snag in Washington.  Maybe it'll come back,
	but for now the project has been suspended.

> ... I have a bit of
>difficulty imagining any application that requires more support than
>what is available in the various modern versions of Unix ...

	Others in this field have encountered the same problems
	and are using variants of the same solutions.  I became
	more aware of this at the ACM SIGGRAPH User Interfaces
	Conference last October, where a surprising percentage
	of speakers reported that LWP's were a key part of their
	solution.  The MACH people at CMU have also done work on
	assigning objects to processes to facilitate object oriented
	programming.

	In our case, we had experience with more appropriate
	architectures for building software with cooperating
	processes from both real time and general purpose work
	that we did in the '70's.


----------------
Paul Raveling
Raveling@isi.edu