Pleasant@Rutgers (10/13/82)
HUMAN-NETS Digest Wednesday, 13 Oct 1982 Volume 5 : Issue 93
Today's Topics:
Queries - Unique Signatures & Home Computers &
Chord Keyboards & An Interesting Survey,
Replies to Queries - An Overview of Interface Design &
Pascal OS,
Announcements - New Mailing List & US DoD Tests Smart Card,
Computers and People - Cable TV and the First Amendment,
Artificial Intelligence - Computer Architecture
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Date: 1 Sep 1982 1939-PDT
From: Ian H. Merritt <MERRITT at USC-ISIB>
Subject: Unique signatures in network mail
I have noticed, over the years, that network mail users often have a
unique signature used at the end of a mail message. I have been
using
<>IHM<>
for some time now, and noticed HOBBIT using
_H*
I find this to be interesting. Has anybody collected a list of them?
<>IHM<>
------------------------------
Date: 4 Oct 1982 9:58:15 EDT (Monday)
From: Robin Clifford <clifford at BBN-UNIX>
Subject: Home computers
I'm writing an article about home computers and users of home
computers. Can anyone out there who owns a home computer get in
touch with me? I'd like to talk to them about it.
I know the topic was discussed in the recent past, so, rather than
bore other DIGESTers with redundant conversation, send any replies
to CLIFFORD@BBN-UNIX.
Thanx,
Robin Clifford
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Date: 15 September 1982 1226-PDT (Wednesday)
From: v.vidal at UCLA-Security (Dr. Jacques Vidal)
Subject: Chord keyboards.
Are there chord keyboards commercially available at this time?
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Date: 4 September 1982 02:38-EDT
From: V. Ellen Golden <ELLEN at MIT-MC>
Subject: Interesting Survey
A contributor to the Boston Globe "CONFIDENTIAL CHAT" has asked for
a survey of VDT (Video Display Terminal) Users. This person uses
the pen name of "BLUE BUTTONS". You may reply directly via U.S.
Mail with a letter to "Blue Buttons" addressed to
Confidential Chat
Boston Globe
Boston, MA 02107
or you may reply by electronic mail to me, ELLEN@MC, and I will
collect the messages in a file, MC:ELLEN;VDT SURVEY and then print
them out to forward them to the Chat. The file will of course be
available for FTPing and if or when "Blue Buttons" should choose to
present the results of the survey, I will undertake to make it
available on-line.
Here is the text of "Blue Buttons"'s letter:
-----------------------Begin text of Blue Buttons's letter
Something has just come to my attention that I'd like your help in
looking into.
I am sure many of us work with video display terminals. I would
like to conduct an informal survey of VDT users and health
problems, or lack thereof. I would appreciate as many replies,
covering as large groups as possible, to the following questions:
(Please answer completely so that duplication can be minimized)
1. Name of company:
2. Initials of operator:
3. Job title:
4. Sex:
5. Type of system used:
6. Average hours used/week:
7. How long working at any VDT:
8. Involvement during pregnancy:
If yes: Please include all the above information for the
other parent and note that the two entries are paired.
8a. What was the outcome:
(1) normal:
(2) miscarriage:
(3) birth defects:
9. Do you have any health problems which you feel may be
VDT-related?
I would be pleased to have answers from entire groups - an office, a
floor, etc. I will try to to compile them and let you know what
sort of results we get.
This is such a large and growing part of our lives, and its so new,
that it's a little frightening to thing how little we know about
possible effects. Does anyone know whether there have been studies
using rats under intense association with VDT's?
---------------------------- end of Blue Buttons's Message
Please note: I am not a member of HUMAN-NETS, so if there is any
discussion of this in HUMAN-NETS, I would appreciate it if any one
participating in said discussion would CC me. ELLEN@MC is fine as
an address.
------------------------------
Date: 2 Sep 1982 0116-EDT
From: Ron <FISCHER at RUTGERS>
Subject: Summary of replies: "Is there an overview of interface
Subject: design?"
I have slightly edited and reformatted the replies I
received to this question. They are in the file
<FISCHER>INTERFACE.REPLIES at RUTGERS, which can be FTP'ed by
logging in with username ANONYMOUS and any password. I'll keep the
replies online for about a month. But here is a summary:
On the very informal (and rambling and slightly fanatical)
side I have always liked Ted Nelson's comments in his book "Computer
Lib/Dream Machines." He also wrote some very interesting articles
for Creative Computing, in his own inimitable style! [Sorry, I
couldn't find the articles, they are interesting.]
Probably more practical are the comments made by some people
from Xerox in two Byte magazine issues, one on Smalltalk-80 [August,
1981 Vol. 6 #8], and the other "Designing the Star User Interface"
[April 1982, Vol. 7 #4, p.242]. Xerox has done rather an amazing
amount of work on this area, from Alan Kaye's Dynabook ideas through
to things like the Star interface.
I received a copy of a very interesting journal article by
John Black (of Yale) and M. Sebrechts entitled "Facilitating
Human-Computer Communication," reprinted from Applied
Psycholinguistics, 1981. I recommend it highly if you want a
cognitive psychology viewpoint on the issues.
As far as books go, I have been told "Design of Man-Computer
Dialogues" by James Martin, is a classic and that although dated
gives a clear summary of choices. B. Schneiderman's book "Software
Psychology" (Winthrop Publishing 1980) also summarizes, but is
rather "surfacy."
I received a thesis paper and other material from Robert
Fenchel describing SARA, the System ARchitect's Assistant. It is a
tool for building consistent user interface, with prompting similar
to the TOPS-20 cmnd jsys, but going way beyond that. Semantic help
is also available, as well as a way to create documentation from it.
This is not online in the summary.
IAN of the University of Waterloo (decvax!watmath!idallen at
Berkeley) sent me a partial bibliography from his master's thesis.
It is included in the summary file.
Interface design seems to be a field unto itself. There are
journals devoted to the subject that go into tremendous detail about
the most extraordinary things. If you want detailed info on a
particular aspect there is a wealth of stuff waiting at your CS
oriented library.
Thanks everyone! Here's hoping we can all utilize the power
of personal workstations, mice and beautiful graphic displays in our
future interface design efforts.
(ron)
------------------------------
From: harpo!druxv!cdash Mon Aug 30 10:02:53 1982
Date: Mon Aug 30 09:47:49 1982
Subject: pascal os
it seems to me a few issues back (i am a new user and have not yet
mastered the intracacies of rereading news) there was a call for an
os on a simulated machine. I had such a beast when I was a teacher.
It was a pascal program to simulate the machine (ala the one in the
back of Shaw's book) and the operating system. If I can get Unix to
read a tops-20 created tape, I still have source of the working
program, an assembler for the simulated machine's language, sample
job streams (for multi-programmed batch), and a reasonable amount of
documentation. Have whomever it was contact me at:
druxv!cdash
C-shub
BTL
31D14 Denver
(303)-451-3922
8-374-3922
------------------------------
Date: 3 October 1982 22:44-EDT (Sunday)
From: The Banking List <Banking at ML>
Subject: New Mailing List
Howdy!
There is a new mailing list, Banking@ML. The current
description of the list is:
BANKING@ML is an interest group to discuss the banking
industry as it is and as it could be, especially including but
not limited to the impact of computer technology. Topics of
interest might include EFT security, technical details of
existing and future systems, rate structures, policies, and
regulatory climates.
Requests for addtions (or deletions) should be sent to
Banking-Request@ML. The archive is contained in the file
COMMON;BANK ARCHIV at ML. Questions, comments and suggestions
regarding the operation of the list should be sent to
Banking-Request@ML.
--Neal Feinberg
------------------------------
Date: 11-Oct-82 10:51-PDT
From: DAUL at OFFICE
Subject: U.S DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE MOUNTS MAJOR TRIAL OF SMART CARD
From: DATA CHANNELS, Oct. 4, 1982, V9 N20
The Department of Defense has decided to test a smart card--a
microprocessor in a plastic card developed be Philips Data Systems
of France--as part of a program to eliminate abuse of the
identification cards currently used by the nation's uniformed
services.
"Waste and fraud through the use of lost, stolen, or forged ID cards
is estimated to cost between $60 million and $100 million a year,"
a spokesman for Intelmatique, the promotional arm of the French
telecommunications administration, told DATA CHANNELS. A large
part of that comes from the military medical care program, he
added.
Congress has ordered the multiservice RAPIDS (realtime Automated
Personal Identification Card System) program. The Navy will be in
charge of the test. Technologies to be tested include the smart
card; the conventional magnetic card supplied by U.S. Bank Note
Corp., Data Card Corp. and others; and an infrared fingerprint
recognition card made by Interlock of West Germany. Only the smart
card uses telecommunications lines, however.
"We deliberately chose technologies covering a wide spectrum--from
the state-of-the-art smart card to the familiar magnetic stripe
card," said RAPIDS Program Manager John Poetker of Input Output
Computer Services Inc., an independent engineering consulting firm
located in Bethesda, Md., and Boston being used by the Navy. "The
end result may be a combination of all the technologies," he added.
The purchase of 2,000 smart cards for the use at the Army's Fort Lee
in Petersburg, Va., represents the first major sale of these
systems in the U.S., an Intelmatique spokeswoman told DATA
CHANNELS. About a dozen are already being used in Minneapolis in
First Bank System Inc.'s videotex trials. A variety of smart card
readers will be tested--including those that are on line to a
central database or connected to a local database--as well as
stand-alone verification of eligibility at points of sale and
points of entry.
Eight-thousand fingerprint recognition cards will be tested at
Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, N.C., and 17,000
magnetic stripe cards will be tested at the Cherry Point, N.C.,
Marine Corps Air Station, the Little Creek, Va., Naval Amphibious
Base and aboard a Navy vessel based in Norfolk, Va . The trials are
to begin in January with final evaluation in September.
------------------------------
Date: 22 Sep 1982 1200-MDT
From: Walt <Haas at UTAH-20>
Subject: Cable TV and the First Amendment
In the last few months several cities in Utah have decided that they
want to censor the programming on cable TV networks. It seems that
the city fathers are concerned that the cable TV companies might
show R (yes R, not X) rated movies, which might not be suitable for
small children. Since these concerned citizens think that certain
individuals might buy the cable and then not stop their children
from watching these hypothetical movies, laws have been enacted to
protect the children by banning from the cable any programming which
the city council considers "indecent". Of course the cable TV
companies are claiming the protection of the First Amendment, as I
think they rightfully should. After all you don't get cable TV in
your home unless you order and pay for it.
Now a new wrinkle has appeared. The city of Bluffdale, Utah has
decided that the cable TV companies will probably win their
constitutional case (and I expect that they are correct) so
Bluffdale has decided to ban the cable entirely, on the grounds that
the city won't be able to control the programming! This is an
interesting turn on the traditional issue of technology and society.
The nearest thing I can think of that is already in effect is the
Soviet practice of controlling all the printing and reproducing
equipment in the USSR on the grounds that you might want to xerox
something blasphemous to Marxism.
So the question is now, does the US Constitution protect your right
to the @i[technology] that makes freedom of speech possible? Or can
a local government preempt access to that technology?
-- Walt Haas
ARPAnet: HAAS@UTAH-20
uucp: harpo!utah-cs!haas
------------------------------
Date: 4 Oct 1982 (Monday) 0537-EDT
From: GLASSER at LLL-MFE
Subject: artificial intelligence and computer architecture
I am a new member of the HUMAN-NETS interest group. I am also
newly interested in Artificial Intelligence, partly as a result of
reading "Goedel,Escher,Bach" and similar recent books and articles
on AI. While this interest group isn't really about AI, there isn't
any other group which is, and since this one covers any computer
topics not covered by others, this will do as a forum.
From what I've read, it seems that most or all AI work now
being done involves using von Neumann computer programs to model
aspects of intelligent behavior. Meanwhile, others like Backus
(IEEE Spectrum, August 1982, p.22) are challenging the dominance of
von Neumann computers and exploring alternative programming styles
and computer architectures. I believe there's a crucial missing link
in under- standing intelligent behavior. I think it's likely to
involve the nature of associative memory, and I think the key to it
is likely to involve novel concepts in computer architecture.
Discovery of the structure of associative memory could have an
effect on AI similar to that of the discovery of the structure of
DNA on genetics. Does any- one out there have similar ideas? Does
anyone know of any research and/or publications on this sort of
thing?
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End of HUMAN-NETS Digest
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