Pleasant@Rutgers (11/28/82)
HUMAN-NETS Digest Sunday, 28 Nov 1982 Volume 5 : Issue 108
Today's Topics:
Computers and People - Communications Breakthrough &
Computers in Education,
Technology - Combinations of Telephones and Terminals &
Keyboards & WorldNet
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Date: 25 Nov 82 2:39:05-EDT (Thu)
From: Randall Gellens <randall.CC@UDel-Relay>
Subject: Re: HUMAN-NETS Digest V5 #106
At one point in the dim, dark, past, we had a fairly active
notesfile system modelled after that on PLATO, but running on other
systems. People devised all sorts of hacks to compensate for the
lack of standard graphics/animation/ alternate fonts available on
PLATO terminals...changing the backspace character to a normal
character (?CHAR BS=^C for example) allowed it to be used at text,
which, combined with line-feeds, and escape sequences (these last
necessitated warnings about which terminal type to read a note on)
gave a fairly broad range of effects. (One I liked was a note that
had space-bs-char for every char, resulting in slow, halting
printing on (we used them then) DECwriters, and slower printing on
screens. A reply asked what baud rate the note had been entered
on).
A lot of terminals in use then xmitted screen control keys as well
as acting on them, which made it fairly easy to do animation.
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Date: 26 Nov 1982 2305-MST
From: JW-Peterson at UTAH-20 (John W. Peterson)
Subject: Computers for school
Those of you who reacted to CMU's plans to require students to
purchase computers may be interested in this one:
The "World Institute for Computer Assisted Teaching" (better known
to WORKS readers as WICAT) currently has a proposal before the Utah
state board of Education asking the state of Utah invest $15 million
in Wicat, for them to develop a standard CAI system to be used in
most/all of Utah's public schools. The state would be the sole
owner of the program and receive the royalties (6% of the sales
commissions) on the software. According to the proposal "the
royalties would continue [at >$3 meg a year] for a 15-year period
... meaning the state fund would be fully reimbursed and the state
would receive $30 million for the hardware acquisition."
The courseware would include subjects such as "English, Writing,
Calculus, Biology, History and Foreign Languages (with Audio)."
These programs are to run on a "System 300 (the Hydra System)" that
has 30 terminals "with audio, graphics and animation" and a CPU with
an 80 meg disk. Price (w/ discount) is given at $67,000.
WICAT's proposal also states they would be willing to "translate"
the programs to other hardware vendors at the states option (the
state would pay extra for this service).
While the proposal does list some of the reservations about such a
move (such as WICAT's current marketing capability, and having one
company as a sole source), Utah's executive directory of
administrative services claims "there are strong, positive feelings
about WICAT's offer and it's potential role in assisting the State
of Utah to develop and utilize CAI materials."
The proposal is set to go before the '83 session of the Utah state
legislature. The source for the above quotes is a Utah State Office
of Education newsletter.
-jw peterson
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Date: 16 Nov. 1982 4:11 pm PST (Tuesday)
From: NNicoll.ES at PARC-MAXC
Subject: Re: Combinations of Telephones and Terminals
Does anyone know of a touch tone phone where each of the twelve
keys, and combinations of same, emits a different tone. You can
type full ASCII with that combination (alphabet on request).
NNicoll
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Date: 24 Nov 1982 22:20:03-EST
From: csin!cjh at CCA-UNIX
Subject: re the sholes keyboard
I'd be curious as to exactly what their claims were about hand
balance; my experience (and due to a publishing hobby I've done a
\lot/ of text typing) is that there are a significant fraction of
words typed almost entirely with the left hand (I think the Sholes
is supposed to call for left-hand strokes 56% of the time in stock
English). Certainly if you compare similar strokes(finger/direction)
for left and right hands, in most of the pairs the left-hand stroke
calls a much higher-frequency letter. Do they claim that this
contradicts other studies, in which the Dvorak was shown to be much
faster (perhaps also easier to learn)?
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Date: 25 Nov 1982 2320-PST
Subject: The changing face of Micro-computing/effects on WorldNet
From: William "Chops" Westfield <BillW@SRI-KL>
Lauren's recent message about CPM 3.0 (to the info-cpm mailing list)
which, summarized, said CPM 3.0 will be nice for OEMs who are
producing a large number of identical systems, but not for much of
anyone else, served to further prompt me into writing this message.
Microcomputing is changing. Is it getting better or worse ?
Used to be, no two systems were alike. If you wanted to sell
software, it had to be configurable for just about anything. And
the people who bought it would have to know how to configure it.
Nowadays, things are a lot different. You can pick one of (apple,
radio shack, IBM, osborne), write software for it that won't run on
anything else, and if it's any good, you become rich. How will this
change the way people compute ?
For example, CPM remains about the only system for which lots of
USEFUL public domain software is available... People with other
systems pay for inferior products. Many people with CP/M will pay
for a product rather than use an equivalent Public domain program...
Why?
Example 2: products aimed at a very specific market are appearing.
For example, spelling correctors and thesarusses that run under
WordStar(tm). What about us Mince/Emacs people?
Example 3: PCNet is/was dedicated to the prospect of running a
common communications protocol on every possible system, so they
could all talk to each other. The idea was to put all of this in
the public domain. PCNet is having serious problems. the only
thing that might save them is that various large, diverse
organizations like SRI, DARCOM, NOSC, etc are willing to spend money
developing PCNet, cause they need their micros to talk to their
large computers. Meanwhile, programs like CrossTalk, which will do
file transfers only to other IBM PCs, has made the top 20 selling
programs for the IBM PC for the last several months.
The question is, I guess: Is the current proliferation of many
basically incompatible micro-computers going to hurt or help the
WorldNet concept?
BillW
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End of HUMAN-NETS Digest
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