Input/output software capability for a man-machine comunication and image processing system

Consistent with the design objectives of the General Motors Research Laboratories DAC--I (Design Augmented by Computers) project, the IBM 7960 Special Image Processing System has extensive input/output (I/O) capabilities. In order to facilitate the programmed control of this new hardware, the NOMAD and MAYBE programming languages were developed. However, while these languages provided the programmer with an effective means of controlling the new hardware, they offered little assistance in meeting the hardware data format requirements. The programmer still would have had to convert his output information from his own internal format to the output format required by the hardware. Similarly, all input from the hardware would have had to be converted by the programmer back to a form suitable for his own use. Moreover, these conversion processes are typically very involved and complicated. In short, the programmer was still not in a position to make easy, efficient, and flexible use of the I/O capabilities of the new hardware system. Thus, the need to provide a layer of general purpose I/O software between the programmer and the hardware was very apparent.