🚀 go-pugleaf

>From SHRAGE@WHARTON-10 Sat Jul 25 09:38:52 1981
I was invited to Sperry's Software Research group and had an
opportunity to speak with them and examine some of the work that
they are doing in workstations and in programmer's tools.  They
are more concerned with the "programmer's workstation" than a
management workstation and thus are putting a lot of effort
into the language that controls the device.  It is designed to
be modified by the user and has inboard multitasking and file
system, etc.  Understand that this design is for a device to be
hung from a large central machine for program developement NOT
for execution of programs.  Here is a short list of the things
that (I saw) that they were thinking about/working on:

1) Pascal debugging/programming aids.  They have a really nice
   design (and partial implementation) for a visual program stepper
   that draws colored boxes around the program structure and then
   highlights the lines as they are executed so that the programmer
   can "see" the program in exectution.  It (will) also display
   the variables and structure nicely. I played with this and it
   made it very very simple to visualize what a program was doing
   (especially when you turn the speed up fast enough and can see
   where the loops are crunching along).  The final implementation
   of this should be very nice.  [Jim Gimple (formerly a Snobol
   afficianado from Bell) is doing this work].

2) A high res/color PWB system with joystick and mouse.  They are
   spending a lot of time working on the "editor language" (which
   is also the JCL and workstation control language) rather than
   "cutsie" features to add to the user view.  The file structure
   is Unix based but they ALSO feel that unix's user view is a
   total lose and are designing one of their own that, from what
   I saw, will be much nicer.  Again, their position is that this
   will be used by programmers, not managers or secretaries and
   they are giving the user power to change things (in a properly
   controlled manner) at whim without too much work.  Currently
   they are having trouble with the Univac hardware research
   people (it's too slow for them) but that should be resolved
   soon.  This project is under control of Marc Fogel and Ira
   Ruben.

3) Help systems.  Knoweldge based and natural language driven (if
   you like) user aids for the station command language etc.  They
   have several NL and AI people very interested in user assitance.
   I don't know how/if this relates to the workstation but it was
   interesting none-the-less.  This work was being done by Nathan
   Relles and Norm Sondheimer (president of the ACL).

All of the above is managed in a very small group of very expert
people by Dick Wexelblat and for more info one can write to 

        Sperry Univac
        Software Research
        2G3 Bluebell, Penna.
        19424

They are going to have an Apollo and/or a couple of Perqs soon.

-- Jeff