The Triad's Wild Card

[Marc Stiegler <marcs>]

I have gotten responses from all the people who will bear the 
brunt of the effort if we try to demo an integrated Autocad/Xanadu 
at Autofact. Everyone wants to do it. Roger will get the Sun 
frontend running; Greg will get the Autocad frontend running; 
Joel will organize  the event from our end with Susan Sheridan 
(poor Susan, you thought you had enough problems already, didn't 
you? :-). 

Here we go!

The general plan is to have fine grain links running to and fro 
between drawn objects in Autocad and textual objects in the Xanadu 
frontend (where the Xanadu frontend is a subset of the planned 
shrinkwrap frontend). Using this capability, we will construct 
some variation of Joel's AEC presentation. This presentation 
currently lives as a series of Supercard pictures of what hypothetically 
"could be". The demo, in embodying a part of this presentation, 
will transform it into what "will be".

My current thought is that both Autocad and Xanadu would be running 
on a Sun 3 (Roger, how much extra nightmare does this give you, 
porting to the 3? Greg, how agonizing would it be to port the 
code you build on the 3 to a 4?).  

John has pointed out to me that it's better to arrange for gear 
that you don't need, than to need gear that you didn't arrange 
for. So, just in case everything's working as planned, I think 
we should arrange to have, not only a Sun 3, but also a Mac IIx 
with a big screen and an Ethernet hookup at the demo. Since the 
Mac frontend is  ahead of the Sun frontend, if the Sun frontend 
can support the demo, the Mac can probably support the Sun. Though 
we wouldn't be able to run a link to an Autocad drawing from 
the Mac, we could run a link from a text document that we're 
seeing on the Sun, out to a text document we're seeing on the 
Mac, and edit either document from either machine.

Wouldn't that be a trip?

--marcs