IBM Systems Journal

A design exercise that resulted in a draft set of panels for the online HELP facility of the Interactive Chart Utility (ICU) has been described. The exercise was undertaken before the program code was completed for the product and suggested certain modifications to the latter. View full abstract»

The architecture of the system discussed in this paper is based on sessions and objects. A way to extend the system is to add new objects. The challenge is to correctly identify the object the user wants to work with. Once this is done, the operations follow quite easily. At first, it is often obvious neither to the system designer nor to the user what the object really is. Another concern is to p... View full abstract»

Although the ease-of-use study group did not focus on the ease of use of computer programs, programming was not ignored. A number of recommendations were made to the programming development organization, and the following activities resulted: • A programming development ease-of-use study group has been established to determine what is needed to produce more usable programming products. ... View full abstract»

The OFS application has evolved over a period of ten years of use and experimentation. The broad-based objectives of office systems have guided the ongoing development. VM/CMS has proved to be ideal as the control program base for such an activity. Actual user experience and feedback have been an invaluable means of validating both implementation and presentation techniques. We have found that wit... View full abstract»

We have examined the procesos f staginddestaging of data with a view toward establishing certain performance characteristics of the MSS. The main issue we address is: What is the maximum throughput achievable on the MSS? The analysis is based on a simple queuing model, the validity of which has been established by comparing its predictions with the measurements gathered in our operational environm... View full abstract»