To M. Metcalf and A. Osborne
From J.J. Bunn and B. Pollermann
Request for a Technical Student in UI Section
The FIND and WHO utilities are heavily used by the VM user community. Unfortunately,
there is no easy access from remote systems to the information provided by these tools.
To allow users of remote systems to access this information is in principle not
difficult. Having discussed this with Bernd Pollermann, we are convinced that a user
interface to FIND based on TCP/IP calls, could be provided which would run on any of the
usual platforms at CERN (VAX, Apollo, Macintosh etc.). To give a concrete example, the VAX
version of FIND would converse with a dedicated service machine on VM, which would receive
the FIND keywords and return the corresponding pages of found information. The VAX user
would then be allowed to select the item of interest, and the service machine would send
the complete FIND information to the user in whatever form was preferred.
The treatment of WHO requests is entirely analagous, and in fact just a special case of
FIND.
We believe the work involved to implement such a tool could be done by a Technical
Student with appropriate supervision. We believe the Division should attach some
importance to providing the effort for such a venture, particularly in the light of the
current committment to Distributed Computing.
I would therefore like to make a strong request for a Technical Student who would do
this work.