Whiteboards that Compute: Goals and Challenges for System Designers

Even after more than thirty years of desktop computing, many (if not most) engineers facing complex problems instinctively run right to the whiteboard. A whiteboard offers an incredibly natural way by which ideas can be remembered: it provides a means of describing and communicating the relationships between complex interacting parts, and can be used to specify rough schematics of final designs. While the utility of these simple smooth white slabs is clear, there is an opportunity here to create a computing device that can provide all of these abilities and more--a computer that is as simple as sketching but as powerful as a modern desktop. Written equations can be captured and solved, sketches of state machines can be executed, and previous drawings can be queried, recalled, shared, and transformed. We are not the first to claim this is an important direction of work, so why do we believe this to be a fruitful direction for systems research now?