Past and future trends for portable tools interfaces

The paper reviews the history of computer science theory and practice, to try and identify the important trends that ought to be influencing the evolution of Portable Tools Interfaces (PTIs). PTIs are a relatively recent development, providing a manufacturer-independent interface to operating-system features. This enables portable software to be written that will run on any machine on which the PTI is implemented. The paper concludes with a requirement for what the authors feel is both a powerful and practical PTI that will support the development of a new generation of programming languages, operating systems, programming support environments (PSEs), and integrated project support environments (IPSEs).