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APRIL 1994
ATM (p. 8) “This year is an important one for asynchronous
transfer mode. The technology now has the backing
of vendors.
“Membership of the ATM Forum, a consortium formed
in October 1991 to accelerate the development and implementation
of ATM products and services, has risen to 465
with new faces from the likes of Microsoft and Novell.
According to Fred Sammartino, forum president, 1994
will be the year many companies set up serious trial
implementations with intent to later incorporate the
technology.”
MBONE (p. 30) “Short for Multicast Backbone, MBone is
a virtual network that has been in existence since early
1992. It was named by Steve Casner of the University of
Southern California Information Sciences Institute and
originated from an effort to multicast audio and video
from meetings of the Internet Engineering Task Force.
Today, hundreds of researchers use MBone to develop
protocols and applications for group communication.
Multicast provides one-to-many and many-to-many
network delivery services for applications such as
videoconferencing and audio where several hosts need
to communicate simultaneously.”
MOBILE COMPUTING (p. 38) “Recent advances in technology
have provided portable computers with wireless
interfaces that allow networked communication even
while a user is mobile. Whereas today’s first-generation
notebook computers and personal digital assistants
(PDAs) are self-contained, networked mobile computers
are part of a greater computing infrastructure. Mobile
computing—the use of a portable computer capable of
wireless networking—will very likely revolutionize the
way we use computers.”
TELEROBOTICS (p. 49) “The significant communication
latency between an earth-based local site and an
on-orbit remote site drove much of the Steler [Supervisory
Telerobotics Laboratory (at the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory)] design. Such a large latency precludes
direct real-time control of the robot in what nonetheless
remains a real-time operation. To meet these
real-time control requirements, our group devised
a control scheme similar to the one used to control
spacecraft.… Instead of transmitting programs to the
remote site, we transmit command blocks (a set of data
parameters) that control the execution of the remote
site software that provides task-level control. This
allows the remote site to handle a variety of control
modes without requiring changes in the remote site
software.”
DIGITAL SOUPS (p. 65) “Last August, Apple Computer
released a much-talked-about new computer called the
Newton MessagePad. It’s the first platform in a series of
Newton products that fall under the term personal digital
assistant (Sharp’s ExpertPad is another). Although Apple
doesn’t describe ‘the Newton’ as a computer, it’s actually
an advanced system that includes handwriting recognition,
full memory management and protection, and
preemptive multitasking. But one feature that the MessagePad
doesn’t have is files. The Newton stores similar
data objects in formats called ‘soups.’ These soups are
available to all applications.”
SOFTWARE STANDARDS (p. 68) “The International
Organization for Standardization is developing a suite
of standards on software process under the rubric of
Spice, an abbreviation for Software Process Improvement
and Capability Determination. Spice was inspired
by numerous efforts on software process around the
world, including the Software Engineering Institute’s
work with the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), Bell
Canada’s Trillium, and ESPRIT’s Bootstrap.”
VIDEOCONFERENCING (p. 96) “For the past two years,
United Technologies Corp. (UTC) has been experimenting
with desktop video communications in its Topdesc (Total
Personal Desktop Communications) program, which has
the goals of completeness and convenience: allowing
separated personnel to communicate as completely and
easily as if they were at the same location, and doing
so whenever and from wherever it is convenient. This
means that parties should be able to see objects and
documents and collaborate easily using computer data.
In addition, the communications unit must be sized and
priced to fit into an office or lab.”
THE SOFTWARE CRISIS (p. 104) “There’s been so much
talk about a ‘software crisis’ over the past decade or two
that you’d think software practitioners were the original
Mr. Bumble, barely able to program their way out of a
simple application problem. But when I look around, I see
a world in which computers and the software that drives
them are dependable and indispensable. They make my
plane reservations, control my banking transactions, and
send people into space. They even wage war—in entirely
new and apparently successful ways.”
Editor: Neville Holmes; neville.holmes@utas.edu.au
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APRIL 2010 11
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