Segmenting Workstation Screen Images
Denis M. Serenyi, John M. Danskin · 1996
Introduction Recently, many organizations have been attempting to develop an inexpensive "Network Terminal." Such a device would have the same functionality as a PC without much of its hardware. In place of the RAM and hard drives that make current mulitmedia PCs so expensive, it would have a widebandwidth network connection and would use network servers to replicate functions previously implemented internally. One design scheme for the Network Terminal is to simply have it display downloaded screen images. This Generic Imaging Terminal (GIT) has many advantages: for one thing, it can be almost as simple as a television set. In addition, the interface is not operating system dependent, so the user could run MacOS, Windows, and UNIX in the same box. The GIT has one major disadvantage, however: uncompressed screen images can be as large as 8--10 MB. Sending these fast enough to provide full interactivity (10--20 fps) over today's networks is at best difficult and at worst impossi