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** ANNOUNCING THE PUBLIC RELEASE OF **
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VEOS 2.0
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Copyright (C) 1992 Geoffrey P. Coco,
Human Interface Technology Laboratory
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VEOS is an extendable environment for prototyping distributed applications for
unix. The VEOS application programmer's interface is provided by XLISP 2.1 (by
David Betz). XLISP provides familiar program control; VEOS provides
interprocess message passing and content addressable database access.
VEOS (The Virtual Environment Operating Shell) was developed for distributed
Virtual Reality applications at The Human Interface Technology Lab in Seattle
and has been in use for two years. However, VEOS is by no means limited to
these types of applications.
VEOS is ideal for applications where hardware resources are not physically
proximal or where machine-dependent resources (e.g. software packages,
interface devices, etc..) are isolated because of their platform.
VEOS is also ideal for prototyping programs which employ coarse grain
parallellism. That is, VEOS uses heavyweight sequential processes,
corresponding roughly to unix processes. In this way, VEOS can be used to
utilize a network of workstations as a virtual multiprocessor.
C programmers can build custom VEOS tools which are accessable from XLISP and
thus are immediately compatible with other VEOS tools. Lisp programmers can
quickly design and run distributed programs which utilize diverse hardware and
software resources through these custom tools.
HITL Engineers have already built VEOS tools for real-time stereo graphics,
sound, position sensing and voice synthesis and input. Many of these tools
will also be released in the coming months.
VEOS is not an operating system. VEOS is a user-level framework for
prototyping distributed applications. Its primary focus is flexibility and
ease of use. This design comes somewhat at the expense of real-time
performance. This is not to say, however, that VEOS cannot achieve good
performance with proper application structuring and tuning.
Relying on only the most common unix interface, VEOS is platform independent.
VEOS 2.0 has been extensively tested on platforms such as DEC 5000, Sun 4, and
Silicon Graphics VGX and Indigo.
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VEOS and associated tools are public. Legal restrictions are described in the
file VEOS_LICENSE. We request that if you do use this software, you register
with HITL by sending your name, address, and proposed use.
To obtain VEOS,
ftp 128.95.136.1 (milton.u.washington.edu)
cd ~ftp/public/veos
binary
get veos.tar.Z
Send registration,
questions,
bug fixes,
or requests to join the VEOS mailing list to HITL
postal: Veos Software Support
Human Interface Technology Laboratory
FJ-15, University of Washington
Seattle, Washington 98195 USA
e-mail: ············@hitl.washington.edu
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