Workstation technology
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb040355 |
| Date | 01 February 1986 |
| Published date | 01 February 1986 |
| Pages | 38-41 |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management |
38
Workstation technology
Birmingham and Loughborough Universities have a considerable interest
in the many factors concerned with workstation design. These may be
broadly classed into two complementary areas: system software issues
(BU) and ergonomics
(LOT),
respectively. Tools for on-screen reading
and browsing will be one of the first areas to be investigated, and a
survey of current document structures from academic journals has been
undertaken to provide background to this work.
The question of designing systems to be independent of the viewing
space on the display terminal is another important component of this
work. Techniques for scaling or degrading images so that they can be
presented on screens of different resolution are to be investigated.
Lastly, combining workstation operation with a communications facility
will require the use of an "intelligent agent" if the differences
between local and remote working are to be transparent to the user.
The design of such agents and their application to electronic
mail,
conferencing and database systems will be an important subject for
research.
Communication networks
The networks to which such workstations will be linked include
Ethernet Local Area Networks
(LANs),
X25 packet-switched Wide Area
Networks
(WANs),
and the Integrated Services Digital Network
(ISDN).
More advanced networks, based on Megastream or similar high-speed
links,
may be considered if they become available during the course of
the project. UCL has a particular interest in the design of network
protocols and in the performance analysis of communications systems.
As mentioned in the previous section, our intention is to extend the
functionality provided by current information services to include a
much greater range of data types: graphics, images and sound, as well
as text. Current wide area network services, however, perform poorly
even for simple text facilities such as BLEND or JANET
mail.
To some
extent this is outside our direct control as it depends on the quality
of the telephone lines, modems, etc. For this reason it may be
necessary, at least in the first instance, to simulate the underlying
wide area communications service by using local area networks.
ISDN communications, in some form, will become available well within
the lifetime of the project. It is anticipated that this technology
will have a very significant impact on all current information
services,
even though it is unlikely to be universally accessible for
some years. For this reason, it is our intention to begin a programme
of experimentation at the earliest opportunity. This will initially
take the form of local testing of the Integrated Digital Access (IDA)
To continue reading
Request your trial