Software Environment

Archiving an extensive, friendly, productive, interoperable software environment was acknowledged to be the most difficult element to achieve. We do have emerging standards such as UNIX, X Windows, and so on that help us to tie together software products as we develop them.

The large number of workstations, as has previously been the case with personal computers, has been the motivating factor for developing quality, user-friendly interfaces. These are where the new things get tried out. That's partly based on the large, installed base and, therefore, the opportunities for profitable experimentation.

Now, these friendly interfaces can be used and to some extent are used as access to supercomputers, but discussion during this conference showed that we have a way to go on that score. Unfortunately—and this was a main topic during the meeting—we do not have good standards for software portability and interfaces in a heterogeneous computing environment. We're still working with bits and pieces. It was acknowledged here that we have to tie the computing environment together through software if we are to have a productive environment. Finally—this was something that was mentioned over and over again—significant differences exist in  architectures , which impede software portability.