Wang Laboratories is expected to extend its Open Systems Interconnect product announcements to Europe next month. Three new Open software packages spanning all seven layers of the model to connect Wang’s VS business computers with other vendors’ machines were announced in the US last month: an X400 gateway compatible with the Cen and Cenelec profiles to connect Wang’s electronic mail to other companies’ offerings; and two products under the Wang OSI Services or Wosis (must they?) umbrella. A Wosis core package provides a four layer basic Open Systems stack to transport level, and Wosis Transport and Session Services products provide session layer services and application program interfaces. The products will be shipped in January 1989. Up to now, Wang has offered only support for the bottom two Open Systems levels with a series of 802.3 Ethernet hardware and transport package. Layers six and seven application interfaces are in the plan, but no date has been given. With sales last year of over $13,000m, Xerox Corp and its Rank Xerox Ltd affiliate must be the computer industry’s best kept secret. Fifty years after the invention of the xerographic copying process, Xerox’s presence in offices around the world is still mostly restricted to the photocopier, despite the company’s best efforts to move into computer-based office automation. This in itself would not be surprising if the list of Xerox computing innovations was not so impressive: the company’s famous Palo Alto Research Center in the eponymous Californian city gave birth to the development of Ethernet-linked computers, file systems and printers; the invention of the mouse and the first use of screen icons with workstations; and major leaps forward in distributed computing, object-oriented languages such as Smalltalk-80, and electronic and laser printing. Bet the company Only Philips comes to mind as a comparable organisation that somehow fails to follow up its research triumphs with deserved commercial success. Vice-president of Xerox Corporate Research Dr William Spenser takes a longer term view. The information revolution is the first major change in the way the world has done its business for 200 years, and like the industrial revolution it will take a long time to mature. We can’t afford to bet the company on early trends, putting ourselves in a poor position for the revolution. So Xerox pours money into research, with centres of excellence at the Palo Alto and Webster Research Center, a Xerox Research Center in Canada, and most recently the new EuroPARC centre in Cambridge, England, officially opened last week by Michael Hardy, director general for telecommunications, information industries and innovation for the Commission of the European Communities. The laboratory employs 23 people with disciplines as diverse as programming and software engineering to psychology, music, linguistics, anthropology, graphics and typography. EuroPARC is just discovering Unix, with a few Sun Microsystems workstations scattered between the Xerox systems. But the real business of the centre is to hide the operating system behind a comprehensive set of tools arranged in a way that will be understandable and useful to the user. EuroPARC’s basic charter is to bring a European perspective into the area of the man-machine interface and interaction between humans and computers. It is well known that the Macintosh interface arose from the pioneering work at PARC in the 1970s. More recently AT&T’s proposed Open Look interface for Unix has gone back to Xerox, partly in an effort to avoid the current legal difficulties associated with Apple’s look and feel, but also to reap the benefit of continuing research at Xerox. It’s therefore not surprising to see that Open Look bears more than a passing resemblance to the hybrid set of tools used by the researches at EuroPARC, which takes some of its elements from the Xerox ViewPoint interface used for Xerox office systems. Each researcher has a workstation on the desk connected to the Xerox Corporate Internet distributed network. Electronic mail
is the most widely used function, and this is supplemented by a number of tools, such as the Finger system, which maintains a database of users logged into the network, along with information on how to contact them; on screen Portraits that allow users to contact others just by selecting the right picture; talk connections that let two users carry on an interactive conversation by using a window each side by side on both screens; and Buttons, which, displayed on the screen, carry out an action when pressed. By creating new buttons, users can tailor their own systems, and buttons can be sent over the electronic mail system, allowing information and new techniques to be shared. One requirement is taken as read for all Xerox interface developments – a large, bit-mapped screen. The ViewPoint interface, for instance, is most effective on a 19 Xerox workstation; reduce it to 15 and much of the usefulness of multi-windowing, banks of folders, in-trays, and function icons are lost. This is no doubt one reason why Xerox systems have not found a mass market – it is still considered an extravagence to have graphics terminals on every desk. But the Xerox approach is in line with the predictions of analysts that say such screens will predominate in the 1990s, something that those who are supporting the bit-mapped-dependent X-Windows standard must also be anticipating. Anthropologists It might be regarded as unusual to employ musicians and anthropologists in a computer science laboratory, but some of the more radical designs for human computer interaction are growing to depend on such disciplines. Presently, the dialogue between computers and humans is largely visual and verbal rather than graphic; a computer presents words on the screen, the user points or types a reply. There is room for sophisticated typography and graphic design to clarify information; a more suitable tool than a mouse could employ both hands to greater effect; and sound (speech and non speech) can be used to improve the dialogue. An informative background hum can let the user know what the system is up to without drawing too much attention – keeping track, for instance, of the complex activity in a multi processing workstation environment. Many more ideas are the subject of research at EuroPARC. But one of the key issues seems to be the setting up of a workable analogy with a real situation, and working it through. Maybe in the 1990s we will all be less concerned with windows and more interested in setting up Rooms. Integrated workstations allow the overlapping of many tasks, so Xerox software allows the workstation to maintain a set of rooms, each with tools appropriate for particular tasks. Users can tailor their own set of rooms to meet their varying needs. The resulting technology can be seen as layers of substrates, each built on the next, each providing less generality, but more easily changed to a particular function within its range of capability.
