26 Mar
2007
26 Mar
'07
1:14 p.m.
On Mar 26, 2007, at 1:44 PM, Jim Leonard wrote:
For early PC editors, having to go through the BIOS is the big
display update bottleneck. Some programs achieved very fast screen
updates by writing directly to the display memory. The venerable
list.com comes to mind.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
Undo
functionality was probably a major sticking point. I don't
remember many editors from those days having undo.
Ironically, it was speed that was a major sticking point. There
were about three editors out of everything I tested with the screen/
input response to satisfy me. I'm not talking about things that
take actual time, like search/replace etc., but regular things like
scrolling or pageup/down. I understand some of these have legacy
terminal roots, but 80x25 is only 4000 bytes of memory, it
shouldn't be rocket science to update it in a timely fashion...
unless your text is represented internally significantly more
complex than structures of strings I suppose.