On Jun 5, 2009, at 1:04 PM, Lux, James P wrote:
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Many years ago I read an interesting paper talking about how modern
user interfaces are hobbled by assumptions incorporated decades
ago. When disk space is slow and precious, having users decide to
explicitly save their file while editing is a good idea. (don’t even
contemplate casette tape on microcomputers..). Now, though, disk is
cheap and fast and so are processors, so there’s really no reason
why you shouldn’t store your word processing as a chain of
keystrokes, with infinite undo available. Say I spent 8 hours a day
doing nothing but typing at 100wpm.. That’s 480 minutes * 500
characters/minute.. Call it a measly 250,000 bytes per day. Heck,
the 2GB of RAM in the macbook I’m typing this on would hold 8000
days of work. In reality, a few GB would probably hold more
characters than I will type in my entire life (or mouse clicks, etc.)
That takes me back. The Cedar computing environment at Xerox PARC did
this around 1981. Every input event, including mouse input and
keyboard input, got a 48-bit timestamp, IIRC. This was done by Dan
Swinehart, who is still there I think. The idea was to never get user
events out of order or delivered to the wrong window due to UI
slowness like moving windows. The text editors didn't lose your work
either.
This was on 4 MIPS (about) machines - the Dorado. They seemed fast to
us: "it sucks the keystrokes right out of my fingers".
-Larry
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