lohman%ibm-sj.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa (08/23/84)
From: Guy M. Lohman <lohman%ibm-sj.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa> [Forwarded from the SRI-AI bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.] IBM San Jose Research Lab 5600 Cottle Road San Jose, CA 95193 Wed., Aug. 29 Computer Science Seminar 10:00 A.M. WYSIWYG PROGRAMMING 2C-012 Though single-user workstation hardware has evolved rapidly to the point of rivaling the mainframes of a few years ago, software has generally failed to keep pace. "What you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) software for text processing and other applications has shown the feasibility of performing applications by direct manipulations of visual objects. But programming languages are still based on a "typewriter" model of communication which has remained essentially unchanged since the 1950's. This model has now been antiquated by the advent of high resolution displays and accurate pointing devices. WYSIWYG applications are often dramatically easier to use than their traditional command-based counterparts. This talk will describe a project to design and prototype an interactive facility for building programs as WYSIWYG objects, by capturing direct manipulations of visual objects on a display screen. The resulting programs are animations which act like virtual users, doing the same things that a real user can do. Building these programs is totally continuous with normal hands-on manipulation of the objects, while writing programs in traditional programming languages is quite discordant with that process. D. Hatfield, IBM Cambridge Scientific Center Host: D. Chamberlin [...]