Re: Pipes

[Juan Rivero <juanr averroes ivic ve>]

SGI had (for all I know, still has) a very nice data-analysis system keyed to large-scale numerical simulations. You clicked on menus to specify filters (FFTs, contour packages, plotters, whatever), which showed up as boxes on the screen; then you rubber-banded lines between boxes to get data from one box to the other. So you could do quite complex data analysis with a few clicks.

--
Juan Rivero		email juanr@averroes.ivic.ve     Tel +582-504-1772
Centro de Quimica       WWW    http://averroes.ivic.ve/  Fax +582-504-1350 
Instituto Venezolano de Investigaciones Cientificas      Cel +5814-933 93 88
IVIC, AP 21827, Caracas 1020A, Venezuela

On Fri, 28 May 1999 15:04:16 +0100, Michael ROGERS <M.Rogers@cs.ucl.ac.uk> wrote:

>  Perhaps the command-line pipe is too limiting a concept - what I'm talking
> about is a way for the user to specify different types of connections 
> between components, to assemble an application. The idea of plugging together 
> a word processor, a spelling checker and a printer applet via CORBA is 
> fantastic, but we need an intuitive way to specify these connections. Maybe 
> this comes down to individual solutions for each application, but some kind 
> of standard "visual syntax" for grouping components would be useful. The
> smarter Gnome is at identifying what components do and what types of data
> they can handle, the more intuitive this can be.
>
>
> Michael Rogers