davis@groucho.ucar.edu (Glenn P. Davis) (08/08/89)
I happened to attend a panel disscussion in Boston last week titled above. The panelists were: Larry Tesler, Apple Computer Martin Dunsmir, Microsoft Some fellow from IBM Bud Tribble, NeXT (apologies for names I got wrong, misspelled, or omitted. The panel composition was not as printed in the program.) The session promised to be interesting (I hoped to hear these guys duke it out) as promised: " Panelists ... address their offerings and seek to justify their technology as the standard that developers should embrace as the next generation of computer graphics interfaces." My major impressions: Everybody sez graphical user interfaces are the way to go. Users and the advanced applications of the 90's need multitasking. Programmer productivity is important -> programmatic access to UI via 'object oriented' interfaces. Standard networking for heterogeneos environments. The amusing thing was that apple, microsoft and ibm are saying, "Yep, just go with us, we'll have all of the above 'real soon now'. But NeXT has already got it. -glenn