Telephones as either stand-Telephones or integral components of computer workstations connected to internetwork. Functions in network include experimental PBX (under our control) for managing voice connections, w/standard access to other internal phones, outside lines, plus a variety of services: list them, but there could be more. Hands-free phone, whose speaker is used in place of a ringer.

We'll spend a day with a peripatetic professional.
These concepts have to be reduced in pomposity and woven into the fabric of the scenario. Parts of the day are spent in the office, parts visiting colleagues, attending meetings, and so on. Some segments of the day require intense concentration without interruptions, others are open to new conversations. There are situations that require collaboration by telephone in order to give each collaborator access to his office files and workstation environment. He has frequent dealings with people over the telephone, many of whom have schedules as frantic as his own.

Event: he's in a nearby office when phone rings. Distinctive duet weaves together his own motif and that of the caller (if another Etherphone user.) Knows then whether to ignore it, dart to his office, or ... This time, asks colleague to register him as a visitor to her office. The ring-duet is now performed on the colleague's phone, permitting the call to be answered there. Subsequent calls will also be repeated there until the visiting registration is cancelled.
Pedagogical device: user-interface vignettes in the margin?

Event: He's working very hard and may not want to be disturbed. Issues a command to use a very subdued audible notification (a single soft bleat) to indicate incoming calls. The caller's identity, an urgency indication, the reason for the call, shows up on the screen. If ignored, will not continue to bother. Can also reject all calls altogether, or all except calls from specified parties or about specified topics. Caller will get a visual explanation plus distinctive tone if using EP-equipped WS; otherwise a synthesized explanation urging them to (a) try harder; (b) call back whenever.

Event: He must spend an hour at a colleague's workstation that has a full-color display, to prepare a presentation. As soon as he has logged in, incoming calls are routed to that workstation's telephone, and the calls he makes are identified as from him. Calls to his colleague continue to arrive there, unless that person is "poaching" elsewhere.

Event: He requests that a conference call be established with several other colleagues (by buttoning their names in a hierarchical, filtered, on-line telephone directory that includes access to his friends, his organization, his company, and ultimately THE WORLD!), and that he not be bothered until all of them who are available are on the line. (He might indicate that he's willing to wait quite a while.) Each colleague's phone rings and displays an indication of what's going on, and each is given a reasonable amount of time to accept or reject the attempt. (If a long time was specified, each party can indicate the length of time he'll be available.) When all parties have accepted, rejected, or timed out. a distinctive tone sounds at each station and the original caller is given the "floor". After his opening greeting, he may enable the conversation for full conversational conferencing, or control the "floor" [Stodowsky ref and comment -- get one].

Event: He is too busy to attend a lecture, so he calls the lecture room (by name or button, of course) to create or join an ongoing conference-call that brings the lecture to any office. If the lecture were on educational TV, its soundtrack or that of any broadcast radio source at least can be distributed in the same way.

Event: he and a colleague are planning the departmental budget. Each has a set of personal documents, electronic and paper, relating to it, so they'd prefer to confer by telephone to a face-to-face meeting. They may have a set of common documents on their workstation screens that they are jointly developing, as well. [Stefik ref. and comment; Colab does this for tete-a-tetes; that code plus this would make nice distributed experiment.] Can use the voice annotation facilities to record snippets of the conversation into the document [Ades/Swinehart], interactively produce and review a script [Zellweger], ad infinitum; isn't this exciting?

Event: George Geargrinder and Karmen Foozle, message-taking. If Lee is calling George from inside, Lee can record the message, indicate the subject, etc., directly. Can use all of the annotation and editing capabilities outlined in [Ades/Swinehart] to compose a good one, comment on earlier work, etc.]

Most of these either exist today in Etherphone system, or are readily achievable. Other capabilities, intended but requiring more work, include attendant facilities such as the Geargrinder episode, side-conversations,
. There are also other features planned or existing than there was space to mention:
. The idea was to indicate the range of activities we wanted to achieve.

feels too big already PABX implemented as Etherphones, packet ethernet transmission and switching, central telephone user interface (as a convenience for wrong-language Etherphone processors) and nucleus switching control, additional control distributed to other servers and to workstations. All communications using same internetwork config. as Etherphones, RPC communications as application of Pup internetwork protocol -- no direct connection of phones to WS. Other services, either sharing telephone control processor or located on separate servers, play major roles in storage of database information, providing authentication, supporting ws functions, and so on.

Will not describe all of the facilities required to do transmission [summary in GlobeCom, future publication], editing and annotation [Ades/Swinehart, Terry/Swinehart], or even the detailed control methods. [future publication.] Will: (a) sketch the object-oriented "conversation management" design that supports the incorp. of workstations, recording service, synthesizer, .... and provides program control; (b) indicate the basic capabilities provided for extensibility of services (object style); (c) ditto for control of important conversation-establishment/termination decisions; (d) use of database to assist with migration of facilities to server, and why we do that anyhow. (e) Perhaps something about reliance on other distributed intelligences to make the system tractable to build by two or three folks.

All examples follow common theme: facilities that can be developed on WS, migrated if desired to server to increase availability -- to stand-alone phones and to WS's in other environments.