[725] in Athena User Interface
Suggested Athena User Interface promo
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Mon Mar 12 16:17:11 2001
Message-ID: <sufHnCRz0001NIPj0P@mit.edu>
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2001 21:17:02 +0000 ()
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: aui@MIT.EDU, owls@MIT.EDU
A little while ago, the similarity between the AUI project and the
Athena port to Solaris struck me. The following promotional prose sort
of wrote itself. I was thinking it might be appropriate to say
something like it in
the Athena Insider, or some other place where we announce big user
visible changes. (Perhaps the IS newsletter?)
What do you think?
-wdc
----
New Athena User Interface Coming
In 1993, Athena took a risk: We replaced aging DECStations with Suns
running Solaris 2.1. We knew that Solaris 2.1 was a young operating
system with an unknown level of robustness. We made our best efforts at
testing and fixing what seemed most relevant to users.
The risk was that we were removing slow but reliable DECStations
and replacing them with fast but possibly buggy Suns. It turned out
that customers were delighted with the speed improvement, and were not
too inconvenienced by the bugs.
This year, Athena takes another risk: We plan to replace the basic look
and feel of Athena, set in the late 80's with a new one based on the young
GNOME toolkit with an unknown level of robustness. Again we have made
our best efforts at testing and fixing what seems most relevant to users.
The risk is that we are replacing a hard to use interface with one that is
easier to use but is slow or buggy. We hope that we succeed in 2001 as
well as we succeeded in 1993. We hope you find the new Athena User
Interface easy to use, fast, and bug free, but we stand ready to work
hard to remedy slowness or bugginess you report to bugs@mit.edu.
