Here's a partial listing of the vendors with booths at the conference,
which I ordered from most to least important.
General Electric
General Electric Corporate Research and Development
showed off what may be the most CAD-related thing I've seen on the net
so far. They showed off a mosaic forms-based system for doing
computer-aided design of plastic parts, which worked as follows:
- An engineer would fire up Mosaic with a GE page containing
forms.
- He or she would enter some design parameters (e.g., the length of the
snapping plastic tab, the strength it had to be) into the form and
click on a "design" button.
- These design requirements would be sent to GE's server, which
would send them to an optimization package (designed by GE plastics
engineers) that looked through the design space and returned a design
specified by intricate geometries (this bit has this radius, this
thing is this thick, etc..
- The engineer would then see
- a 3D graphical representation of the returned design
- a description of the GE plastic best suited for implementing this
design (here's where they win: any supplier who makes it this
easy for engineers to use their products is going to win)
- graphs showing the optimizer's behavior (figure of merit over time?)
- comments on what was ``difficult'' about the design, such as
which parameter the optimizer had to work hard to acheive
- If this design was satisfactory, I presume there would be some
way of saving it, or sending it off to the ordering
department.
I was told that this work was ARPA-funded, and I believe it is available
publically.
They also had a system whereby a FORTRAN (ugh!) program could be
analyzed and given a Mosaic forms-based interface. This amounted to
looking at the parameters of a given subroutine (FORTRAN-speak),
building an HTML document with the necessary forms, and making it so
that the server, when given a form, with the necessary input fields
filled out, would execute the FORTRAN program and return the results
in another HTML document.
Adobe
Adobe Systems Incorporated
was showing off their new Adobe Acrobat 2.0 software, which addresses
the problem of distributing electronic documents. Their approach is
to use a smarter version of PostScript, called PDF or Portable
Document Format, that can be easily searched. They've had this for a
while, but it hasn't caught on.
This time, however, it looks like they're beginning to get the right
idea. They're freely distributing browsers for the PC, Mac, and Unix
platforms, and intend to charge you for programs that convert from
other formats into PDF. The fellow I spoke to claimed that they had a
program capable of reverse-engineering PostScript files into PDF. It
sounds quite impressive, and they appear to be offering substantial
educational discounts.
Besides being a good place to catch a lot of people who like
electronic publishing, they came to the conference because Acrobat
includes hypertext (i.e., URL) link capability.