Communications of the ACM articles from October 1996

Communications of the ACM archives from October 1996

Seeding networks: the federal role. (includes related article on printed and online sources of networking data)
October 1, 1996... Many federal agencies have contributed to the development of networking, but the work of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the Department of Defense, and the National Science Foundation (NSF), stands out. The ARPANET established the...

Digital politics. (online political propaganda)
October 1, 1996... With the U.S. presidential election upon us, it may be useful to reflect on the political future of cyberspace. An exciting new technology like the WorldWide Web is simply too much for a politician to overlook. Attracted to the hype like moths to...

NSF's new program for high-performance Internet connections. (National Science Foundation)
October 1, 1996... The National Science Foundation played a pivotal role in the development of the Internet through a program of grants that provided startup funding for a national backbone network, a system of regional networks, and initial connections for college...

Request for a virtual IT college. (information technology)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 1996... The need for business re-engineering is often documented [2] and tightly linked to the capabilities afforded by information technology (IT) to support virtual organizations. Who will re-engineer IT education? Public-sector educators are not doing...

Software patterns. (software development)(Cover Story)
October 1, 1996... Mature engineering disciplines have handbooks that describe successful solutions to known problems. For instance, automobile designers don't design cars using the laws of physics. Instead, they reuse standard designs with successful track...

The interaction of social issues and software architecture.
October 1, 1996... Designers must account for human social issues, not just technical concerns, when making architectural decisions. It has been said that architecture follows organization and organization follows architecture, but little has been written about...

The pros and cons of adopting and applying design patterns in the real world.
October 1, 1996... Design patterns are a valuable tool for the practicing software professional. There are a number of pragmatic benefits from using design patterns, and, not surprisingly, there are also a number of common problems. This sidebar shows project...

Designing concurrent and distributed control systems.
October 1, 1996... After a decade of real-world experiences, the applicability of the G++ pattern language is well documented. The object-oriented paradigm claims to promote reuse, reduce development time, and improve software quality. Originally these...

Aspects of software adaptability.
October 1, 1996... In today's rapidly changing business environment, adaptability is a critical weapon for survival. Businesses must be adaptable in order to meet increasingly narrow market windows. This need for adaptability at the business level has changed the...

A training experience with patterns.
October 1, 1996... The challenges of instructing pattern technology can be a learning experience for students and trainers. A group of respected individuals in the object-oriented (OO) community have been taking a hard look at the work of Christopher Alexander,...

An essential design pattern for fault-tolerant distributed state sharing. (Recoverable Distributor)
October 1, 1996... Because developers of distributed programs focus on performance and fault tolerance, distributed design patterns should highlight these aspects of their solutions. One such OO design pattern - the Recoverable Distributor - allows mixing and...

Selecting locking primatives for parallel programming.
October 1, 1996... The pattern language described here helps select synchronization primitives for parallel programs, avoiding primitives that interact with a given program's locking design. The only reason to parallelize a program is to gain performance....

PICS: Internet access controls without censorship. (Platform for Internet Content Selection)(includes related article on PICS specifications)
October 1, 1996... A labeling infrastructure for the Internet offers a flexible means of content selection and viewing. With its recent explosive growth, the Internet now faces a problem inherent in all media that serve diverse audiences: Not all materials are...

Why are CASE tools not used? (Computer-Aided Software/Systems Engineering)
October 1, 1996... CASE (Computer-Aided Software/Systems Engineering) tools are claimed to increase information systems and software development effectiveness in terms of productivity of systems development and the quality of the developed systems. However, the...

How reuse influences productivity in object-oriented systems. (software reuse)
October 1, 1996... Although reuse is assumed to be especially valuable in building high-quality software, as well as in OO development, limited empirical evidence connects reuse with roductivity and quality gains. The authors' eight-system study begins to define...