INTERFACES FOR COOPERATIVE WORK

Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is one of the newer hot topics in the computer world. CSCW is also known as Collaborative Computing, and CSCW applications are known as `Groupware' or `Group Decision Support Systems' (GDSS). The marketplace is just beginning to be subjected to a flood of CSCW applications. It requires no prescience to predict that most of this groupware will fail; as the papers covered in this article demonstrate, there are a lot of uniquely hard problems associated with CSCW that are only just beginning to be understood, let alone solved. Just as one industry wag noted that `the year of the LAN lasted from 1983 through 1988,' it seems likely that any `year of groupware' will be good for another five or ten years.