GRAVITY TWENTY THREE -- Friday, October 9, 1992

One year ago this early morning, I was lying in a hospital bed getting my neck x-rayed while a cop waited to take me to jail for nearly killing myself in a car. This event has much to do with why I came back to Lehigh. At the time I was making a lot of money working for a Novell consulting firm, and had pretty much given up on Gravity, my novel, and my degree.

Isn't it sad how money makes us do that? Just a few months of a slick
professional well-to-do BFD lifestyle and I'd forgotten my idealistic
ambitions. I'm very glad that nearly dying brought me back to Bethlehem.

In other news, systems are collections of names. The other three aspects are easy enough to understand. When an agent sends a text item to a screen agent, the text gets displayed on the screen according to the context of that screen agent. When an agent sends an image item to a printer agent, the image gets printed according to the context of that printer agent. When an agent sends a sound item to a midi agent, the sound gets played according to the context of that midi agent.

system items are a bit harder to explain. I'd love to be able to show each of you some illustrations in my design books. This would make things much clearer. But as I'm now limited to this linear medium, I'll put it in words.

The first thing to mention is that Gravity describes an open environment. Extensibility has been a design criteria from the beginning. I've long thought that the current method of software distribution is bogus. You buy a word processor. It does lots of things you need to do, and many more things you don't need to do. They come out with a new version. The new version has some things you like, and many more things you don't like. You've got to live with Wordperfect 5.0 or dBASE IV or NetWare 3.11, and while these programs allow you to customize them to some extent, they're strictly canned... made for the masses. You might be able to get closer to your exact needs by adding one or more of the many add-on utilities that extend the capabilities of these standard packages, but more likely than not you'll end up confusing things hopelessly, or at the very least you'll have to spend long frustrating hours getting everything to work.

Of course that's what consultants are for, and we wouldn't be able to
charge $105 an hour putting things together if it was easy. I'm not proud of the years I've consulted. It's a dirty game. You find yourself
intentionally making things sound complicated to clients just so they'll
keep using you. Once you've explained how things work, they don't need you. I for one would be terrifically pleased if the whole computer consulting profession became unnecessary. Power to the people, and all that.

At any rate, systems in the Gravity scheme are thoroughly extensible. You can add and remove functionality on the fly. This means that you can buy a bare-bones system that does just what you need, and later add feature upon feature as your needs change.

Systems are something like programs, but the word 'program' does not accurately describe what a system is. Programs are somewhat static, whereas systems are entirely dynamic. Systems change all the time.

They evolve as you use them.