If workstations are the ultimate desktop machines, what would the ultimate, no-compromises, forget-the-cost workstation be?
Voice interfaces, handwriting input, holographic displays-you might as well join the crew of the starship Enterprise.
But actually, workstation users and vendors polled on their dreams seemed to have a more meat-and-potatoes attitude, firmly anchored in the here and now.
”I hate to sound like a Hewlett-Packard stooge, but my dream machine would be the one I have on my desk,” said Steve Vranyes, a senior software engineer for Motorola`s Private Trunks Systems Division in Schaumburg. He has an HP Series 700 workstation with a color monitor, 32 megabytes of RAM (random access memory), 840 megabytes of disk storage and 58 MIPS (million instructions per second) performance-not a shabby configuration.
”My dream machine would be one that could take a design directly from the design software and do the structural analysis for you,” said Nick Mehta, director of worldwide engineering at the J I Case Worldwide Engineering Center in Hinsdale. ”Of course, the new (Hewlett-Packard Co.) workstations we have are like a dream-10 to 15 hours of work can be done in 15 minutes. How much power do you want? Remember, everything has a price.”
Dale Spangler is a little harder to please. ”I would like to see some standardization among the various versions of Unix,” said Spangler, a senior research scientist at G.D. Searle, a pharmaceutical company in Skokie. Most workstations run on one of the 25 or so versions of American Telephone & Telegraph Co.`s Unix operating system.
Of course, once you`ve talked about dream workstations with Donald Gaubatz, vice president for workstations at Digital Equipment Corp. in Maynard, Mass., there`s not much left to dream about.
”The one on my desk has a video camera, and I can videoconference with anyone else on my network, which runs 54 miles into New Hampshire, and talk to them as if they were in my office,” he said. He also touted ”smart” ID badges that can track a bearer`s position in the office so that telephone calls can be directed automatically to the nearest phone.
”I am my working environment. The computer is not my working environment. So the next step is to take the environment wherever I am,”
Gaubatz said.
”The dream workstation would be one where you could talk to (it) and not be chained to the keyboard,” agreed Ed Pastor, a marketing executive for Digital based in Boxborough, Mass. ”Soon there will be enough horsepower available” to recognize speech.
Gaubatz`s idea of the ”traveling environment” was echoed by Steve Furney-Howe, marketing manager for desktop products at Sun Microsystems Inc. in Mountain View, Calif.
”My dream workstation would be a tool that matches the way people work,” Furney-Howe said. ”It should make the computing environment natural, instead of forcing people to work the way the computer does.
”It should be able to deal with voice, video, text and audio material, do a lot of different things at once and insulate me from the complexity of what`s going on in the background. It should eliminate the need for a phone and a fax machine. It should let me manage my life from the desktop. It should be something I can take on the road.
”It`s something we are going to have fun developing.”
Finally there is Bob Weinberger, product marketing manager for Hewlett-Packard Co.`s workstation group in Chelmsford, Mass. He would settle for the best of all possible worlds:
”The ultimate desktop would be a combination of three worlds. It starts with the wonderful interface, distributed computing and high performance of a Unix workstation, combined with the large number of shrink-wrapped applications available in DOS and the ease of use you find today in an Apple Macintosh.
”Nobody has it yet,” Weinberger lamented.
