Interactive systems: Patterns and prospects

Abstract

Presently, the bulk of interactive systems are, besides of transactional systems, educational and commercial time sharing systems. With the advent of inexpensive stand-alone CRT terminals with computing power as, for example, the IBM 5100, programmable in APL, the emphasis of interactive compting will shift to computer aided design systems, computer aided training systems, interactive systems for the delivery of health care, interactive data management systems, etc. On the hardware side, microprocessors will provide an inexpensive way of equipping terminals with "local intelligence", and novel "non-von Neumann" computer architectures will provide improved hardware support for interactive languages that will feature syntactic simplicity, transparency, and data independence. As an answer to the question who the designers and implementors of interactive systems will be and how the end user is to be portrayed, a division of labor between the system programmer, the application expert, and the end user is postulated. The language requirements for these three groups are discussed and trends are recognized.