26 Oct
2012
26 Oct
'12
2:37 p.m.
In article <CAOLi1KAuKbiy7rz6zyf3X70AC=HUHBjQuew4F-VBX=Yw+sF0Rw at mail.gmail.com>,
Francois Dion <francois.dion at gmail.com> writes:
Back in 1988, while in school, I wrote an NAPLPS
compiler/decompiler.
Wrote some applications (games, mostly) that would run on the Bell
Canada system (Alex). Terminals were grey scale, named Alextel, but on
a computer with modem, there was software that supported NAPLPS in
color. They (Bell) were basically wanting to replicate what the French
had been successful at, the minitel. Too bad not much was archived
from that era. I didn't even think about it back then.
Anybody else dabbled in NAPLPS? (ANSI X3.110)
I remember reading about NAPLPS in BYTE at the time it came out. I
never heard of anyone that actually implemented it. The BBS dudes
went with the ANSI escape codes supported by the IBM PC and clones and
other terminal manufacturers already had their own standards like
ReGIS from DEC and Tektronix 4010/4014 graphics sequences. Only a
couple people ever supported the ReGIS coding sequence besides DEC,
IIRC. By the time it was feasible to make a cheap graphics terminal,
it was also feasible to make a cheap PC with graphics and suitable
client software that talked any protocol you wanted.
Instead of encoding cool looking screens in protocols like NAPLPS,
people just had client software downloading GIF images that served as
the screen backgrounds. Graphics terminals are something I've been
studying over the past few years. People either went with emulating
someone else's popular escape codes (like Tektronix 4010/4014, still
embedded in xterm today), or had their own unique escape codes that
people used to support their specific terminal. Tektronix raster
graphics terminals use a completely different kind of command sequence
mechanism from the earlier storage tube designs.
If you really wanted portability between graphics terminals from
different manufacturers, you used a piece of middleware to make those
terminals conform to a single interface. The middleware was generally
an incarnation of one of the graphics standards originally promulgated
by SIGGRAPH, such as CORE, GKS or PHIGS. There were also libraries
provided by manufacturers that provided a uniform API for different
products, such as Tektronix PLOT10 and PLOT50.
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" free book
<http://tinyurl.com/d3d-pipeline>
The Computer Graphics Museum <http://computergraphicsmuseum.org>
The Terminals Wiki <http://terminals.classiccmp.org>
Legalize Adulthood! (my blog) <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>