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From: mlandau@Diamond.BBN.COM (Matt Landau)
Newsgroups: net.micro.mac,net.unix
Subject: Re: Porting UNIX Applications to the Mac
Message-ID: <816@Diamond.BBN.COM>
Date: Mon, 15-Sep-86 12:19:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: Diamond.816
Posted: Mon Sep 15 12:19:35 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 15-Sep-86 21:07:09 EDT
References: <1572@cbdkc1.UUCP> <1091@hoptoad.uucp>
Reply-To: mlandau@slate.BBN.COM (Matt Landau)
Organization: BBN Labs, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 26
Xref: mnetor net.micro.mac:6989 net.unix:5493

In article <1091@hoptoad.uucp> tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) writes:
>
>Briefly, the problem is this.  On the Mac, all user applications are graphic
>applications.  On UNIX, very few applications use graphics beyond those
>attainable on a hardcopy character-graphics terminal.  
>
>To make matters worse, it is impossible to just change the applications to
>use a bitmapped user-friendly interface.  One of the great strengths of UNIX
>is the ability to create multi-process programs, even on the fly, by using
>pipes and i/o redirection to chain together multiple programs.  This is made
>possible only because of the use of a character-stream, non-graphics
>interface for most applications.  

There was a very interesting presentation at this year's Summer Usenix
on communicating data between processes in different windows existing
in a graphical user environment.  It was called "A Data-Flow Manager for
an Interactive Programming Environment", and was given by Paul Haeberli
of Silicon Graphics.  The accompanying paper may be found in your local
copy of the 1986 Summer Usenix Proceedings.  The system amounted to a
way to pipe data between graphical manipulation and display programs, and
provided a user-interface that made specifications of input and output 
sources easy (lines and arrows, etc.)
-- 
 Matt Landau      	 		BBN Laboratories, Inc.
    mlandau@diamond.bbn.com		10 Moulton Street, Cambridge MA 02238
 ...harvard!diamond.bbn.com!mlandau     (617) 497-2429