Prototype for remotely shared textual workspaces
Hussein M. Abdel-Wahab, Sheng-Uei Guan, J. Nievergelt · OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) · 1987
Computer-based collaboration between geographically dispersed users is still limited primarily to electronic mail and file transfer, but there is increasing interest in computer support for real-time interaction between remote users. The problem of implementing remotely shared workspaces, which allow users to operate simultaneously on the same objects, is of broad interest. Our objective is to show textual workspaces that allow real-time collaboration can be implemented efficiently by using existing operating systems and communications primitives. This paper documents our experiences in implementing a prototype under Berkeley UNIX, using the programming language C, and Berkeley Interprocess Communication facilities. The authors describe design alternatives that take into account the communications bandwidth between the different sites of the network, and they introduce an efficient protocol that regulates user access to the shared workspace.