Abacus, slide rule, calculator and computer have served engineers well as valuable tools. But two characterists of these tools have limited their usefulness. The first is the privateness, each communicating with and serving only one private owner. And the second is the subservient role they play in relation to thier users.

How can we make a tool that is public and open, and acting as a partner rather than a servant? How would such a tool increase our ability to do engineering and other analyses?

Briefly, this tool is both a translator of engineering capabilities and a communicator of analysis collaborations. As a translator, it translates language humans understand to that computers understand. But the real advantage is its ability to burden the difficulties in thinking for humans.

As a communicator, it uses a technology called software robot to make sure that all the analyses done by one engineer can be understood, reused and added onto by others. The software robots are simply executable documentations that allow the computer to redo exactly what are formally documented, on its own independent of the engineers who created them.

The ROBACUS project shall initiate itself by creating a core of developers in the academic environment. Courseware and software are to be passed on to interested teaching staff. Once the communication links are put in place among collaborative R/D nodes, this tool will start to grow by being used, maintained and developed by users.

The translator, communicator and a third component, OUTERNET, would be described below, with a focus on how they would be constructed.

I. TRANSLATOR - NATURAL LANGUAGE PROGRAMMING

The natural-language programming program translates user's English answers to questions asked by the computer into Fortran statements that computers can understand. In practice, a user would be generating functional modules for specific tasks. Eventually, the Fortran statements would be mostly CALL statements of modules already constructed.

A core of software engineers would be responsible to develope and maintain this natural-language programming program. But the users of this program for productions would contribute new modules to it in their routine chores.

The programming aspects of natural-language programming program is described in the link: NATURAL LANGUAGE

II. COMMUNICATOR -- SOFTWARE ROBOTS

In ROBACUS, the user is either engaged in the generation of a robot or using an existing robot to perform a prescribed task. The variety of tasks that the robots are capable of performing ranges from writing a program to preparing an input model or an output plot.

Besides documenting what the task is, a software robot also carries out the task. Thusly, ROBACUS shifts the focus from "what has been done" to "how it is done". But the most important impact is that now we can communicate among ourselves without ambiguity thru the software robots, or more exactly, their executions.

The programming aspects of software robots is described in the link: SOFTWARE ROBOTS

The spontaneous accumulation of a knowledge and experience in the software robots in each ROBACUS node points to the benefits of their shared uses. This brings us to the concept of OUTERNET.

III. OUTERNET -- WWW OF SOFTWARE ROBOTS

OUTERNET is a network of wakeable personal servers made up of ROBACUS'ized home PC's. It can be looked upon as an encyclopidia of how-to's.

After the initial stage of developement by software experts, the medium and the most critical stage could be a coming together of generations -- the old, previous generation and the young, next generation.

With letters enlarged and computer skills simplified, many of the retired technical professionals can learn to help develope ROBACUS. Without the pressure of short-term returns, the focus can be concentrated on future. Once all the inner working of ROBACUS is made as reasonable and natural, the youngsters would be introduced by the elders to a virtual world of computing that is void of all the idiosyncracies that hallmark our irrational world of expediencies.

The long term development of ROBACUS would be spontaneous, since these youngsters will find themselves in a robotically computerized world that has grown up with them.