Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!ficc!karl From: karl@ficc.ferranti.com (Karl Lehenbauer) Newsgroups: comp.unix.i386 Subject: Re: Graphic characters in Norton Utilities SYS-V Keywords: Norton Utilities, graphic characters Message-ID: Date: 31 Jul 90 17:05:05 GMT References: <175@hafro.is> <1990Jul26.011852.1180@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us> <1990Jul27.104059.12955@pegasus.com> Reply-To: karl@ficc.ferranti.com (Karl Lehenbauer) Organization: Ferranti International Controls Corporation Lines: 20 Programs that directly went to display memory rather than through the BIOS are the number one reason why the capabilities of MS-DOS have been so slow to evolve. Yes, on the original PC because the BIOS was poorly written, display I/O was very slow. But because of this crufty hack, tens of millions of people sit running one task at a time on machines perfectly capable of useful multitasking. Now people who have cut their eyeteeth in the environment-of-the-crufty-hack bring their malodorous workarounds to Unix, an OS that, having evolved in an environment where memory mapping and protection were omnipresent, never really provided people with much incentive to do weird hacks that boosted performance of specific programs while encumbering the OS developers with the need to provide backward compatibility to their funky kludges, and we are to bless it? No way. If you want to make display update faster, do it at the driver level so every program can take advantage of it. Otherwise, stick to the problem at hand, namely, your application, and do not gratuitously bypass the OS. -- -- uunet!ficc!karl "I am here by the will of the people and I won't leave uunet!sugar!karl until I get my raincoat back." -- Metrophage