A Tight Coupling of Workstations

This paper addresses the problem of situations in which people at physically distant locations must have access to essentially the same computing environment at the same time. That is, each user must be able to provide input to whatever application or system is active, and must be provided with all relevant output. Common examples of this situation are demonstrations, presentations, education, and troubleshooting. A prototype system has been developed to study ways of solving this problem in the microcomputer workstation environment. The prototype allows users at two IBM Personal Computers to share access to the computing environment through the keyboard and the display screen by tightly coupling the computers.