Looking at Workstation Architectures from the Viewpoint of Interaction

Introduction Today's design of sophisticated graphics workstations may be character ized by the terms 3D-system, user driven, object-oriented user interface and multiple-windows system with the challenge to create high level interfaces for the application programmers. All these properties require a great amount of computing power, especially if we look at 3D-systems with high images quality. On the other hand it is well-known that speed, which means system response time, is the most important aspect of interactive systems. More than any other attributes, speed decides whether a new system or technique is acceptable or not. "Not only did the speed make the user happier, but productivity went up." /Brad-85/ This will be the first point of discussion treated in this article followed by a preview of current architectures, a short analysis of interaction, an observation of implementation techniques and finally pointing out a new hardware approach for the implementation of very fast interactive systems.