dan@WATSON.BBN.COM (Dan Franklin) (01/10/89)
Maybe we could talk about something more interesting? I find the question of the "desktop of the future" a very interesting one. But comments so far have only described new hardware developments like the DataGlove and small variations on the desktop, like the "virtual room" (or set of rooms). By themselves, these developments will not lead to breakthroughs in computer use. They'll never lead to the kind of stuff you see in Cyberpunk books, where (apparently) computer hackers routinely survey a "landscape" containing hundreds of computers, each with thousands of files, looking for interesting information (or weaknesses :-). What kind of future user interface SOFTWARE would lend itself to this kind of operation? Dealing with massive complexity--being able to find the needle in the haystack--is clearly going to occupy more and more people trying to cope with the "information explosion". I can even speak from experience. In my current work I often browse among files in almost a hundred directories, with each directory containing a couple of dozen files. I'm trying to figure out what part of a rather large software system is responsible for some errant behavior that just turned up that morning, or what part of the system would break if I made a certain change. It helps a lot that I can represent each file or directory as one line on a big screen, and I can order the files by date, type (filename suffix, that is), or other salient characteristics. I can even do this for the contents of many directories at once. (Try *that* with MacOS!) But it's still very clumsy, and I do this almost every day! What I want is a way to look at hundreds or thousands of files at once, in such a way that possibly-important properties, whatever they are, spring out at me. Maybe show each file as a small blot, and let the color and shape of the blot reflect whatever properties I'm interested in at the moment: files created more recently than 24 hours ago, files containing calls to "system", or even object files that are out of date with respect to the source files needed to recreate them. These are all selections I've made (or wanted to make) as I went browsing. In a 3D world, I could imagine having the "interesting" files literally stick out of the mass. Or maybe I'm interested in a continuum, rather than a binary question: how old is each file? How big is it? How many functions are in it? What files are the most complex by some (user-defined) complexity measure? Is there a correlation between that complexity measure and revision rate? And so on. I could imagine lots of questions I'd want to ask of these thousands of files, if only I could ask them easily and get instantly comprehensible answers. THAT'S where the future is! Dan Franklin
bzs@ENCORE.COM (Barry Shein) (01/10/89)
Dan Franklin raises a good point. The current wisdom seems to be the metaphor, specifically the desktop metaphor or office metaphor. There's a lot of common sense to this, obviously seeing familiar objects being used in familiar ways has its appeal. However, computers also tear down the metaphors, we do things we wouldn't think of doing with more physical objects like edit them mercilessly and search thru millions of items every several seconds trying to locate something. Someone on another list asked a wonderful question, what part of my office/desktop is a "menu"? There it is, perhaps the most salient feature of this desktop metaphor and it has absolutely no counterpart (other than those chinese and italian takeout menus you have tacked to your wall.) Maybe we're kidding ourselves. Sure, steamshovels are big shovels and locomotives are sort of fast, never-tiring mule trains but at some point quantitative changes become qualitative changes, especially in technology. The ability to do something inconceivable (dig a huge hole in hard earth, carry hundreds of tons of goods cross-country in a day) creates changes which can't be described as mere extensions of the past, something fundamental has truly changed (build skyscrapers, feed an entire country on produce grown thousands of miles away.) This is the thing that fascinates me far more than a better desktop metaphor, I want to know what we will be doing with these new tools which we never conceived of before. I don't want a better way to shuffle a zillion pieces of paper, I want to finally face the fact that all that paper-shuffling is wrong! Seriously, isn't it quaint to look back and think of the folks who saw the first automobiles and remarked "oh, horseless carraiges!", and reflect on how truly limited their vision was? -Barry Shein, ||Encore||
cory@gloom.UUCP (Cory Kempf) (01/11/89)
In article <8901092247.AA05892@multimax.encore.com> dan@WATSON.BBN.COM (Dan Franklin) writes: >I find the question of the "desktop of the future" a very interesting >one. But comments so far have only described new hardware >developments like the DataGlove and small variations on the desktop, >like the "virtual room" (or set of rooms). I have to admit, this is probably a better place for this than .Next is... Isn't the 'virtual room' concept more a software one? as in 'shell'? >By themselves, these developments will not lead to breakthroughs in >computer use. True, IF you are only considering the OS/HW changes and not considering the changes in the way that people think about the systems that they are on as a result of this. Take the mac for examle... the idea of the desktop, and all that goes with it led to a lot of ideas that are (loosely) based on this metaphor. It has changed how people view the system, and what occurs to them to do with it. Kinda like spinoff technology... >What kind of future user interface SOFTWARE would lend itself to this >kind of operation? Dealing with massive complexity--being able to >find the needle in the haystack--is clearly going to occupy more and >more people trying to cope with the "information explosion". Looking at files is a rather static view of the system... the idea of a computer program is a batch mode apporach. If we can get faster hardware/better algm's, it should become feasable to view software in a more interactive mode... to actually see the data as it is flowing around the system... Of what use this would be, I am still working on, but one thing that I can see is a faster turnaround time -- with the changes being made while the system is opperating (ie reach in a swap the bad code object for a new one... add/change the functionality of the system without the need of source, etc. >It helps a lot that I can represent each file or directory as one line >on a big screen, and I can order the files by date, type (filename >suffix, that is), or other salient characteristics. I can even do >this for the contents of many directories at once. (Try *that* with >MacOS!) But it's still very clumsy, and I do this almost every day! cakewalk. Before you start putting down a system, the least you could do is research it a bit. In fact, on the mac *I* can do better. But I really don't see any good reason to start a 'my system is better than yours' battle... (With work, I could probably do something similar on any good system) Personally, I am hoping that the idea of files as static disk objects will fade away (if it ever becomes reasonable to have several Gb of RAM, of what use is a Hard Disk? -- there was a blurb in a one of the tech rags that I read a long time ago about some research using bi-state protiens as memory cells. They predicted something on the order of 10 Gbit/cm^2 density. Use a low power laser to read, a higher power one to switch. Nonvolatile.) >What I want is a way to look at hundreds or thousands of files at >once, in such a way that possibly-important properties, whatever they >are, spring out at me. It sounds like you would be in a world of sensory overload... picture the cockpit of an airplane... now increase the number of controls, dials, etc 100 fold. Now find the usefull data with everything blinking lights at you to get your attention. I generally use a form of grep to deal with this... If I tell 'ls' to give me the data, I can use 'grep' to show me only the data that I want to work with. The only real problem is that it takes a while and is clumsy. On the Mac II (when I have access to a colour monitor, I use different colours to represent different things... either projects, or types of files (ex: all .h files have light blue icons) I would like to see other text attributes as well as colour added to the text listing of the directories though. >Or maybe I'm interested in a continuum, rather than a binary question: >how old is each file? I wonder if it would be practical to set up a system of colours and shades to represent continuum function gradiations... such as age for example... old data would fade out, current data would be bright... perhaps a version of grep that would alter the way that the the list in the current window is displayed, based on the values of the data objects... say turn all files that match the current selection pattern bright red? etc? I could go on for ages on this... maybe (if I get the time and inclination), I will write another micro-story... don't think that I am putting down the idea, cause I'm not. Just don't limit the ideas that are already out there. +C -- Cory ( "...Love is like Oxygen..." ) Kempf UUCP: encore.com!gloom!cory "...it's a mistake in the making." -KT
jdb9608@ultb.UUCP (J.D. Beutel ) (01/11/89)
(Barry Shein) writes: > >Dan Franklin raises a good point. > >The current wisdom seems to be the metaphor, specifically the desktop >metaphor or office metaphor. There's a lot of common sense to this, >obviously seeing familiar objects being used in familiar ways has its >appeal. > [...] >This is the thing that fascinates me far more than a better desktop >metaphor, I want to know what we will be doing with these new tools >which we never conceived of before. I don't want a better way to >shuffle a zillion pieces of paper, I want to finally face the fact >that all that paper-shuffling is wrong! Interesting discussion. Whatever the future brings, I'd bet it will involve some sort of non-linear representation (i.e., pictures instead of words). I do not take seriously the interfaces of today that use pictures and metaphors to make computers friendlier, but I do recognize that 'a picture's worth a thousand words.' Ultimately, in the cyberpunk future, the interface wouldn't be just a picture, thought--it'd be sight and sound and smell and touch and, hey, while we're at it, why not invent a few extra senses? If the bottleneck of our brains is I/O, maybe we can expand our interface? In the near future, how about adding sound to sight? Certain files could make distinctive noises, like a low, background hum. If it were done well, I'd find it more helpful than annoying. Some terminal key-clicks, for example, I like. (tvi925 is one) Too bad that most are annoying. 11011011
bowles@MICA.BERKELEY.EDU (Jeff A. Bowles) (01/12/89)
"Certain files could make distinctive noises...." Look at the mailbox mechanisms some R&D sites have today: you send a letter to George, and *YOUR* picture appears as an icon is his mailbox. If I were editing music files, I'd want a couple of different handles for the file: 1. A representative grandstaff reduction of some recognizable portion, i.e. the dit-dit-dit-dah for a transcription of Beethoven's Fifth (1st movement); 2. That recognizable portion, played on my MIDI interface. Note that I'm not (NOT NOT NOT) talking about VIEWING the file, but viewing the directory in which it resides - we're talking about the handle for the file as it appears in a directory. If I were viewing information on art work, perhaps I would have a folder for each major artist, and the folder "name" would be a reduction of the most well-known work he/she created. Why should it say "Rembrandt" in whatever typeface, when it can show me his self-portrait? Note how the Mac has multiple ways to name a file - an icon coupled with a name, a miniature icon coupled with the name (and other verbose info), and so on. The practice is reasonable - certainly better than the 1960's method of naming files things like X.OBJ X.LOAD X.LIB X.FORT X.PLI X.ASM although on Unix, we're much better than that - we use one-character suffixes! If files were, in fact, sets of observations (think about statistics for a sec), perhaps the handles you used might be something else, but the idea that you might view a directory KNOWN TO CONTAIN RELATED FILES using something like "show the directory as a 2-D graph in which the files are on the X-axis and the maximum data item from each file is its Y-coordinate". I agree with whomever said that this sort of thing would be a powerful tool. Imagine someone else combining a couple of the above examples, and saying "each file contains a score, let the handle for the file be the highest note appearing in the tenor line and show me the directory." It this a database query? Sorta kinda. The only problem I see is how to make such a system extensible. You can't imbed A-L-L the different ways to show a file, because as I indicate in the above examples, you could come up with a lot of different TYPES of files. Still, it's a good place to start: something that would be nice to use, albeit not easy to implement.... Jeff Bowles
gwills@maths.tcd.ie (Graham Wills) (01/12/89)
Mr. Shein writes ... > >Seriously, isn't it quaint to look back and think of the folks who saw >the first automobiles and remarked "oh, horseless carraiges!", and >reflect on how truly limited their vision was? > > -Barry Shein, ||Encore|| Why does he think so ? What are the crucial differences between autos and carriages which make someone who thinks they are similar "quaint" ? After all, they have the same basic function, transport; they both need regular maintainence, polishing; they inspire(d) similar feelings in their owners - affection, pride; they are (were) status symbols; In recreation they are (were) used similarly, for racing, going for a drive in the country; etc. etc. etc. In fact the only *real* differences are that cars go faster and can travel for longer distances more easily. Socially and psychologically they perform the same function. They would have been much more quaint if they had remarked " Oh, a new type of transport which will cause fundamental changes in the way we live " Graham Wills TCD, Ireland
dan@WATSON.BBN.COM (01/13/89)
I said: >What I want is a way to look at hundreds or thousands of files at >once, in such a way that possibly-important properties, whatever they >are, spring out at me. Cory said: >It sounds like you would be in a world of sensory overload... picture >the cockpit of an airplane... now increase the number of controls, >dials, etc 100 fold. Now find the useful data with everything >blinking lights at you to get your attention. Not at all. I'll try a more concrete example. The screen you're looking at right now can show you at least 2000 ASCII characters or so, but you don't suffer information overload. If each of those characters represented a process, and you specified that processes with different amounts of cumulative CPU time should be represented as one of the characters ".", ":", or "X", you could instantly spot the long-running processes in far less time than it would take to scan a typical "ps -l" for high numbers in the cpu time column. When the number of entities gets large, it's the traditional way of displaying things that causes information overload. But I *would* suffer from sensory overload if I could not adjust the display parameters as quickly and easily as I adjust the steering angle of my car. I'd need to move through many changes to get the display right and avoid the problem you describe. This is where new hardware, like the DataGlove, might come in. >Looking at files is a rather static view of the system... Very true. I was just giving an example from my experience. Actually I think the problem with files is not that they are "static", since any information system is going to have static pieces of information, but that files almost always represent the wrong level of granularity. They either have too much or too little information in them. (And of course in traditional systems there are no links between files other than being in the same directory.) > ... to actually see the data as it is flowing around the system... There are systems that do this, in circumstances when it's appropriate. A USENIX in the last year or two featured a signal-processing system which used icons to represent filters of various kinds, tape recorders, oscilloscopes, etc. You could interactively couple them together in various ways and "see the data". I've often wanted the same thing with UNIX pipes; my ten-stage pipelines are very elegant but real killers to debug. Dan
alex@aipna.ed.ac.uk (Alex Zbyslaw) (01/13/89)
In article <210@maths.tcd.ie> writes: >In fact the only *real* differences are that cars go faster and can travel for >longer distances more easily. Socially and psychologically they perform the >same function. Couldn't disagree more. The fact that you can travel long distances in short times, at your convenience is a considerable factor both socially and psychologically. Scale really does matter. The same, I think, hold for computers. Eniac (if it still exists) is not equivalent to a Sun or a Cray, which (hopefully) won't be equivalent to the nth next generation. What matters most is what you can do with it, not some abstract functional equivalence. --Alex JANET: alex@uk.ac.ed.eusip ARPA: alex%ed.eusip@nss.cs.ucl UUCP: ...{backbone}!mcvax!ukc!eusip!alex [CSNET BITNET]: alex%ed.eusip%nss.cs.ucl@[csnet-relay cunyvm]
bzs@pinocchio.encore.com (Barry Shein) (01/14/89)
From: mcvax!ukc!cs.tcd.ie!tcdmath!gwills@uunet.uu.net (Graham Wills) >>Seriously, isn't it quaint to look back and think of the folks who saw >>the first automobiles and remarked "oh, horseless carraiges!", and >>reflect on how truly limited their vision was? >> >> -Barry Shein, ||Encore|| > >Why does he think so ? >What are the crucial differences between autos and carriages which make >someone who thinks they are similar "quaint" ? >After all, they have the same basic function, transport; they both need >regular maintainence, polishing; they inspire(d) similar feelings in their >owners - affection, pride; they are (were) status symbols; In recreation >they are (were) used similarly, for racing, going for a drive in the country; >etc. etc. etc. That's perhaps a satisfying, reductionist attitude, but are you really going to contend that the only difference to society between a horse and carraige and a car is one goes faster etc? What about the suburbs? What about the highway industry? What about the trucking industry and the nationwide commerce it allowed (hmm, ok, this might be a little less dramatic in Ireland than in the US due to the geography, I don't know), what about postal delivery and how it affected everyone's way of doing business? See, that's the whole point, taking a reductionist attitude I can argue that there's really no difference (in business) between computers and a clerk, they both just sort of shuffle files looking for things and making entries. Would you really try to propose this to someone like American Express? I can argue that steel beams are just a stronger form of cast-iron girder which is just a stronger form of wood beams, but where were the wooden skyscrapers and the ensuing centralization of commerce they permitted? Is a nuclear bomb just a bigger bang? Or has something slightly more happened, some deeper effect? etc. My point is methodological, the clue to the future is not so much in looking at how things are the same, it's trying to develop the vision to see how things are different! -Barry Shein, ||Encore||
jbn@glacier.STANFORD.EDU (John B. Nagle) (01/15/89)
In article <210@maths.tcd.ie> gwills@maths.tcd.ie (Graham Wills) writes: >They would have been much more quaint if they had remarked >" Oh, a new type of transport which will cause fundamental changes > in the way we live " Which, of course, the railroad had done fifty years before. John Nagle
doug@isishq.FIDONET.ORG (Doug Thompson) (01/22/89)
AZ>From: alex@aipna.ed.ac.uk (Alex Zbyslaw)
AZ>In article <210@maths.tcd.ie> writes:
AZ>>In fact the only *real* differences are that cars go faster
AZ>and can travel for
AZ>>longer distances more easily. Socially and psychologically they
AZ>perform the
AZ>>same function.
AZ>
AZ>Couldn't disagree more. The fact that you can travel long distances in
AZ>short times, at your convenience is a considerable factor both socially and
AZ>psychologically. Scale really does matter.
AZ>
AZ>The same, I think, hold for computers. Eniac (if it still exists) is not
AZ>equivalent to a Sun or a Cray, which (hopefully) won't be equivalent to the
AZ>nth next generation.
AZ>
AZ>What matters most is what you can do with it, not some abstract functional
AZ>equivalence.
Agreed! The auto was a horseless carriage, and initially filled the
role of the horse-drawn carriage and existed side-by-side with it.
However the auto has done much that the horse-drawn vehicle could not
do. It transformed rural communities within 100 Km of a city into
suburbs, because it provided economical and convenient access to the
metropolis which the horse could not. It reduced travelling time, so
people could take jobs that were 70 Km distant. So people took those
jobs. Horse-drawn vehicles would never have inspired freeways, nor the
degree of daily mobility which billions enjoy because of it.
Social mobility was enhanced, and demographic patterns were
transformed. In agriculture, the tractor (an ancestor of the car)
created a labour revolution, increasing the work which one person
could do in a day quite dramatically. This too had its demographic and
economic effects. It meant cheaper food, more food with less labour,
and contributed the the historically unique proportion of
city-dwellers in the modern first and second worlds. Without the
tractor most of us would still be living on the farm.
When you significantly alter cost and speed factors, everything else
tends to change to reflect that. The printing press revolutionized
communication, even though it used the same alphabet as hand-writing.
It did so because one writer could address millions with a press, and
only a few thousand without one. The press also reduced the cost of
information on paper dramatically which permitted more people to make
more use of it. That too had important side effects.
The auto is one of the best examples though, because it has so
dramatically changed the appearance and the demography of every place
it has been widely deployed. And it has happened within a couple of
generations. In 1899 when my grandmother was born, autos were less
common than computers are today. Today she lives near a freeway and
comments sometimes about the changes. The compounded side-effects are
such that almost nothing is the same as it was in 1899! The auto is
not the only agent of change, but it is involved in most. The world
wars shaped our era very much. Both were massively influenced by
internal combustion engines in surface and air vehicles.
Blitzkrieg and submarine warfare, aerial bombing, and many of the
remarkable phenomenon of the world wars would not really have been
possible without internal combustion engines. Their development was
very much a product of the auto industry.
This is more than a horseless carriage we're dealing with here . . .
=Doug
--
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