Towards the Process of "Transforming" Traditional Stand-alone Environments into Cooperative Ones

Stand-alone work is the most common form of man-machine interaction since the beginning of the computer era. The user interacts only and exclusively with the machine, by asking for and obtaining services from it. In contrast to cooperative environments, no form of collaboration with other users is considered. In this paper we present a widespread cooperative model as also technical strategies for the support of groupwork facilities in stand-alone environments. We will introduce a testbed system - VirtualX (Virtual multimedia environment of X), which allows small groups to establish a common cooperation framework while keeping to work in their own local workspaces. These last may be turned 'sharable' and made 'cooperative' to other group members.