resources | daly & hopper, 1992 [research interview]
Janet Daly & Mary Hopper, Passages from Personal Interview, March 4, 1992
Passage 1
Daly: The two major issues regarding truly distributed multimedia are network capacity and data compression tools. We weren't sure whether we had adequate bandwidth to accommodate full motion video as well as data across the same network. If you then look to data compression tools, you must find proven effective and reliable data compression tools, otherwise when they don't work, you've hosed everybody on subnet and you make no friends. Thus, the Project Athena multimedia work involved the local delivery of video from a video disk player connected directly to the workstation, and the local digitization of that analog video signal by a digitizing board installed into the workstation.
Passage 2
Daly: Yes. Well, we jumped, making the transition from experiment to
establishment. And that involves very real sets of changes. But things have been going very well thus far.
Hopper: Actually, suppose we use a life cycle analogy. It sounds like you're still functioning and growing then?
Daly: It's like going through an accelerated childhood, adolescents and now we're young adults. I'd say we're young adults, and what we have to do is now, as a young adult you have got responsibilities to your community. Instead of putting things out and seeing how they work, and then taking grief afterwards, we're doing it carefully. What does a DOS user need? What level of connectivity does a Macintosh user want to Athena? And instead of giving them everything, we just give them what they ask for, or do some projection based on more evaluation of the customer's immediate and longer term needs. We work on developing a solution. And then we put that solution out in the field for rigorous, vigorous testing. And when it's working stably, it's finished.
© Mary E. Hopper [MEHopper] |
MEHopper@TheWorld.com
[posted 01/01/01 | revised 02/02/02]