We are all aware of the development of increasingly sophisticated, elaborate, and expensive computer programs, particularly in the fields of artificial intelligence, data base management, and intelligent systems. The need for techniques to deal with such complexity has renewed interest in programming language research. Recent work on structured programming, intelligent compilers, automatic program generation and verification, and high-level optimization has resulted.

Rochester's Intelligent Gateway (RIG) system provides convenient access to a wide range of computing facilities. The system includes five large minicomputers in a very fast internal network, disk and tape storage, a printer/plotter and a number of display terminals. These are connected to larger campus machines (IBM 360/65 and DEC KL10) and to the ARPANET. The operating system and other software support for such a system present some interesting design problems. This paper contains a high-level technical discussion of the software designs, many of which will be treated in more detail in subsequent reports.