Wit: An Infrastructure for Wireless Palmtop Computing

Wit is a system infrastructure that supports wireless connection of palmtop computers to a wired local area network (LAN). The system includes a primitive windowing system, nonpreemptive threads, reliable and unreliable connections, and a Tcl interpreter[Ouster94] that allows applications to dynamically extend the palmtop system and user interface by downloading sequences of Tcl code. Together, these services provide an environment for exploring issues in mobile computing for small devices by supporting a wide range of solutions for hiding low bandwidth constraints, and permitting disconnected operation through local execution of application functions.