27 Jan
2003
27 Jan
'03
7:50 a.m.
Andreas Freiherr wrote:
It wasn't a full implementation of the standard.
That's why we didn't
officially call it GKS, but GUGS, a German abbreviation for
device-independant graphical system. But it was sufficient to do
assorted tasks from mechanical engineering, from basic line and point
diagrams using GPL and GPM through a 3D frame drawing of machine part
derived from a CNC program, at the university of Darmstadt. However, the
stuff was developed in a commercial project, so we probably would have
needed a hard-to-get permission to offer the code to the DECUS library.
At times, I was paid from this project.
Jerome Fine replies:
The same with some code I intend to port to V5.03 of RT-11.
OTOH, I am certain that there is no commercial
interest in this material
any more, and I definitely plan on digging out the old save set and
continue development. The bad news is that this is another project on a
long list, so maybe I need somebody to more efficiently manage my time...
Likewise. I seem to be spending more time working out the details.
Also, no one else seems to care about it in any case.
I do keep a Tektronix 411x (the one with the larger
screen - long time
since...) terminal at home, together with a tablet, and hope to add some
input capabilities to the library at some later time.
Once I got the task to estimate the amount of work needed to support a
given terminal (for output only). I was supposed to spend about one hour
on looking at the manual, but I came back after about one and a half
hour with a working driver for the device.
We even had a shell around GUGS that would have a call interface similar
to an older library with Benson- and Calcomp-based routines. This way,
old plot programs could be adapted to more modern devices by interfacing
them to GUGS in the shell instead of re-inventing the application.
The basic kludge with the overlay tree, developed on RSX, was to create
a separate tree for the library: this made it easy to propose a
framework .ODL file that could be readily applied to any user program,
and then optimized for either space or speed.
Any possibility that it can also be used under RT-11?
I used a
VAX/VMS system in the early 1990s and discovered all
of the wonderful enhancements. Ever since I have attempted to
figure out how to port some of them back down to RT-11. One
such as the Logical Name List capability is close to completion
as a Path Handler in RT-11. Also similar to the PATH NAME
is DOS.
Backporting? - Oh yes, part of my diploma work was a
reduced-functionality SMG$ (VMS' Screen ManaGement routines) library for
RSX, written in MACRO-11. I use it at home for EVA, the "Electronic
Video Archive" (my private video collection is managed on a PDP-11).