27 Jan
2003
27 Jan
'03
4:28 a.m.
Jerome,
Jerome H. Fine 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.
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...
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.
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).
--
Andreas Freiherr
Vishay Semiconductor GmbH, Heilbronn, Germany
http://www.vishay.com
Andreas
Freiherr wrote:
For RT-11, I earned a reputation as an "overlay expert" when I managed
to run several applications based on our own GKS (Graphical Kernel
System) library within the address space of 64kB. The overlay tree was
ported from RSX, and the same library was available for TOPS-10, VMS,
several PC (DOS) FORTRAN compilers, and one FORTRAN implementation on
the Atari ST.
NOW that would be very interesting. Is there a copy of the source
available? Was it ever submitted to DECUS? I have been
using VAX/VMS since some V4.n version, around mid-80s, and
OpenVMS/AXP since 1992, when I had the pleasure to run a field test site
for V1.5, clustered with VAX/VMS V5.5. One of my projects was writing a
print symbiont (using the SMB$ interface to the queue manager, not PSM$
routines).
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.