USE OF A PERSONAL WORKSTATION TO ACCESS OPEN NETWORK SERVICES

Imagine that people have powerful, flexible workstations which can adapt to their work habits, and that they use an open distributed computing environment for information and computing resources. I argue that the user should have a uniform and seamless view of the computing environment. In addition, the user has a large investment in wordprocessors, spreadsheets and other personal productivity tools. It becomes natural then to argue that the network applications should interact with the user employing the user's personal productivity tools. We need to develop an abstract view of the capabilities of a User Interface Management System (UIMS), which is at a much higher level than graphics interface standards like X11, and also standards for the communication of documentation from an application to a UIMS. There must be standards for sharing models of data structures and definitions of the semantics of their various components. This paper sketches some requirements for the solution of these problems, based partly on data base technology and the design of persistent programming languages and access procedures for persistent object stores.