00100	                EXCHANGING REPORTS USING THE ARPA NET
00200	
00300	                          by John McCarthy
00350	
00400		A  basic  purpose  of the ARPA net is to enable collaboration
00500	among people at different projects.  One aid to achieving this is  to
00600	make  up-to-date documentation relevant to a project available to all
00700	users.  Already, at Stanford, keeping documents in the  computer  has
00800	led  to  an  improvement  in  up-to-dateness  of  documents.  This is
00900	particularly important because out-of-date documentation  is  one  of
01000	the  major  reasons  why  one  group will decide to do a project over
01100	themselves rather than rely on other people's work.
01200	
01300		An important aid to collaboration and an important  incentive
01400	to  using  other  people's  work  would  be  to  allow  a user of one
01500	installation to print on his printer up-to-date copies of text  files
01600	maintained in other places.  This suggests the following:
01700	
01800		1.  An  ARPA  standard  be adopted for transmission of texts.
01900	This  includes  character  set  or  better  yet  a  standard  set  of
02000	characters  plus a standard way of describing non-standard characters
02100	and pairing them with their codes and a standard  way  of  presenting
02200	certain  kinds  of figures, ideally including both stroke figures and
02300	density rasters.
02400	
02500		2. Each installation needs  a  printer  capable  of  printing
02600	standard  texts.   Ideally, this would include an arbitrary character
02700	set and the two kinds of pictures.
02800	
02900		3. A good printer should be able to print on  both  sides  of
03000	the paper and should be able to send sheets to any of several pockets
03100	so that it could sandwich small print jobs in  the  middle  of  large
03200	ones.  Clearly, only non impact printers can meet these requirements.
03300	
03400		4.  Certain  standard files with standard names need to exist
03500	at each installation.  Included  in  this  would  be  directories  of
03600	files.
03700	
03800		5.  It  seems  rather unlikely to me that the ideal mentioned
03900	above can be attained in the near  future,  but  we  could  at  least
04000	permit  each  installation  to  print  other peoples reports that are
04100	written in 94 character ASCII.
04200	
04300		6. A suitable conference  should  be  called  and  prepare  a
04400	report on proposed standards for the next ARPA contractor's meeting.
04500	
04600		The following Stanford experience is relevant: About half our
04700	reports are kept  in  the  computer  including  the  most  frequently
04800	updated  documents.   People  do print themselves copies of documents
04900	some of which are change  notices  for  multilithed  documents  whose
05000	masters  are prepared by computer output.  This is facilitated by the
05100	fact that Stanford settled on a 114 character set  in  1964  when  we
05200	ordered  our  PDP-6,  and  this set includes lower case.  It is clear
05300	that the utility programs that provide directories and the look-up of
05400	information  in  publicly available files need to be improved.  It is
05500	also clear that such a system would be even more useful  for  looking
05600	at  the  files  of  other  projects than for looking at our own where
05700	important documents are available in multilith.  In a few months,  we
05800	will  have about 25 display consoles capable of displaying full pages
05900	of text, and then  reading  through  the  machine  will  become  more
06000	popular.