Purely historic question: VT200 text graphic programming

[Grant Edwards]

On 2011-03-10, GrayShark <howe.steven at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Mar 2011 18:02:41 +0000, Grant Edwards wrote:
>
>> On 2011-03-10, Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam at whitemice.org> wrote:
>>> On Thu, 2011-03-10 at 00:38 -0600, GrayShark wrote:
>>>> Once, many, many, years ago, I programmed some type of 'graphical'
>>>> interface on a VT200 terminal (only DEC VAX/VMS programmers are going
>>>> to know what this is). Question. What was the library I linked
>>>> against? Yes, you remember, painting boxes with ascii and the superset
>>>> of ascii.
>>>
>>> It was curses [ these days people typically use "ncurses" ].
>> 
>> Curses that can't be what the OP is referring to.
>> 
>> Curses wasn't a VAX/VMS thing, it was a Unix thing (that has been ported
>> to other platforms as well).
[...]

> Actually it was curses;

You tricked me by saying only DEC VAX/VMS programmers would know what
it was.  In fact, many, many Unix programmers knew about curses (and
still do) and very few VMS programmers ever did.  C wasn't very widely
used under VMS, and VMS had it's own screen formatting and form
handling libraries.

> it came with the C compiler.

Yep, along with a bunch of other libraries that originated in the Unix
world.  For the full dose of surrealism, you could install DECShell
and have a pretty complete Bourne shell command-line environment with
the whole suite of v7 utilities.  The process-creation overhead on VMS
was _brutal_ and shell scripts ran dog-slow -- but they ran.

> What was more entertaining was that I using a legacy Fortran program,
> DEC Fortran (actually had pointers!) and linking to a C curses
> interface.
>
> Most exciting. The rest of the project was about realtime data
> collect and processing on a microvax III. In the mid-90, that wasn't
> doable at 1 milliscond time steps. VMS was just not realtime aware.

-- 
Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! I'm receiving a coded
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