Aucbvax.2165
fa.works
utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!works
Wed Jul 8 02:13:38 1981
Re: Switching tasks and context
>From Nowicki@PARC-MAXC Wed Jul 8 02:04:15 1981
I can't help describing a Multi-window terminal program I wrote last year at
Stanford (with the help of Vaughan Pratt and Jeff Mogul). My reasoning was
that although "integrated systems" with menus and standard user interfaces were
desired in the long run, we needed a short-term tool to help develop such
systems. My program runs on the SUN workstation, which provides RasterOPs
on an 800x1024 bit screen at roughly the speed of 16 pixels/microsecond, and
computing power about 1/4 of a VAX-11/780.
The program has one simple function: an aribtrary number of virtual terminals
are displayed in arbirary windows on the screen. Each of these virtual terminals
may be to any machine on the local ethernet, or on the Arpanet (via a
gateway). Characters the user types get sent to the "current" host, (except for
one escape character used to enter commands), and characters sent from the
remote hosts get printed in the corresponding virtual terminal. When something
more urgent comes up, you just create another window (which can partially or
fully overlay the other windows), and when you're done you destroy that
window. At any time you may select any window to be "current", so there is no
LIFO restriction.
The important thing is that such a tool WORKS, and I find incredibly useful.
The virtual terminal uses ANSI standard escape sequences, so we can use all the
tools that have been around for a long time (like the SAIL Display Service,
Emacs under TOPS-20 or Unix, etc.) with NO modifications. We are planning to
use this to develop a more integrated system, but it is nice to have the power of
all that useful but obsolete software out there.
-- Bill
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