Magic Schools and Computer Functions

[Milo v3]

I'm sure I will describe this incorrectly but, I'm currently writing up an setting that has an item where you enchant a book with silent image as a holographic interface and detect magic to sense for specific versions of spell schools that touch the surface of the illusion.

Then people have gloves with Magic Aura spells that can change what school of magic energy they give off on a special "frequency" that the book item thing is meant to detect, which then causes an arcane mark enchantment to edit the book accordingly. This allows the wearer to interact with the books through the holographic display, and the aim is to start producing manapunk computers, abet maybe basic ones.

But I am not sure what effects to tie to what schools of magic. So far for basic use (if you enter a specific program it might have different functions assigned to different schools) I have:

Conjuration, bring up search menu
Divination, bring up properties menu
Illusion, copy and paste
Necromancy, delete
Transmutation, move

So, anyone have any ideas what different functions different schools of magic could have, general use or in applications?

[DoomHat]

Abjuration= Firewall.Exe ?
Shouldn't Transmutation be an [Edit] function?

[Ashtagon]

To me, everything described falls into illusion.

It's not necromancy, as no life/death energy manipulation is involvedf.

It's not conjuration, as nothing physical is being created. Similarly, nothing physical is being changed from one form to another, so not transmutation.

The internal search functions are arguable, depending on how involved it is. If the UI is effectively the same as thumbingthrough a book's table or contents, index and/or glossary, then I wouldn't count it as that. If it's more akin to the UI reading the user's mind to determine what they want, then yes, divination would be involved.

If the "book" allows you to generate specific magical effects,that would be the school associated with that effect (eg evocation for fireball).

[Milo v3]

To me, everything described falls into illusion.

It's not necromancy, as no life/death energy manipulation is involvedf.

It's not conjuration, as nothing physical is being created. Similarly, nothing physical is being changed from one form to another, so not transmutation.

The internal search functions are arguable, depending on how involved it is. If the UI is effectively the same as thumbingthrough a book's table or contents, index and/or glossary, then I wouldn't count it as that. If it's more akin to the UI reading the user's mind to determine what they want, then yes, divination would be involved.

If the "book" allows you to generate specific magical effects,that would be the school associated with that effect (eg evocation for fireball).

The school auras aren't creating the effects. The magic auras are just inputs created by the Magic Aura spell effect, for the detect magic spell to read (like a keyboard or mouse), and an arcane mark enchantment (which I just realize I missed in the OP) then edits the book, which alters the silent image enchantment.

The reason for assigning them to schools is because detect magic can only detect schools rather than specific spells, limiting inputs to only a limited number of forms.

[Ashtagon]

In that case, what you have in effect is a computer that instead of having a keyboard+mouse input, has a base-8 "clicker" as an input device.

Assign each school a number from 1 to 8. Every function will be encioded as a three-school sequence. For example, "bringme the files from archive number 23" would be "142-23".

There may well be some attempt at creating a mnemonic relationsghip between function and schools used as part of the keyword, but ultimately there will be enough codes needed that a strict relationship won't be possible.

As a related example of what I mean, consider the traditional relationship between UK telephone area codes and numbers assigned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_numbers_in_the_United_Kingdom#Four-digit_area_codes