XShare, an Environment for Shared X-Windows Applications

The major shifts in computing go through the Dawning Age of the 1950s; the Age of Mainframes in the 1960s; the Age of Minis in the 1970s; the Age of Personal Computers in the 1980s; and finally the Age of Parallel and Distributed Computing in the 1990s. Today and tomorrow, parallel and distributed computing will play an increasing role in the field of computers, due to the increasing demand for resource sharing, computation speedup, reliability, and communication. Therefore it was necessary to rise up to the new challenges in the field of computing by introducing new courses and software packages to help make difficult computer related concepts more within reach to students. To realize those ideas we have designed and implemented a package named XShare that utilizes the availability of powerful workstations connected through a network to allow a group of users to work together synchronously in realtime sharing applications and utilities where each user can see what other users can see