clipka wrote:

> Unfortunately not - I started my computing career no earlier than in the
> mid-80s, after having seen (and toyed around with) a C64 somewhere; and I
> wasn't older than 12 back then.

Fortunately perhaps. The Commodore PET was one of those desk tops with
a built in monitor. It had, I guess, a 16K ROM and 16K of RAM. (That's 
K) and
programs we stored on a cassette tape.
> 
>> If I remember right, the QuickBASIC and QuickC
>> IDE's were models of what a good simple IDE should be. Microsoft was
>> good in those days!
> 
> They're not bad these days either. It's just that the typical scale of
> applications and desired UI paradigm has changed a lot.
>

In those days MS wasn't trying to hog the market (or lacked the 
resources to try),
didn't have a monopoly, and didn't rely on advertising hype for sales. 
And they hadn't
come up with idea of letting their users. Today I avoid everything 
Microsoft that I
can. To my regret, I let price influence me to by another Windows 
machine about a
year ago. I've kicked myself ever since!


>> Yes access to Windows graphic functions seem unnecessarily complicated and
>> poorly documented. I can't see any good reason for this.
> 
> As for being poorly documented, I'm not sure. Might be one of those cases of
> documentation written for people already familiar with the concepts. As for
> unnecessarily complicated, I'm quite sure this was originally due to
> performance constraints in the advents of GUIs, and later due to compatibility
> issues.

What you say maybe true. Also writing good documentation may be a difficult
poorly paid, and thankless task.

> Turbo Pascal - and I think Turbo C/C++ as well - did not use hard-coded routines
> to access graphics, but proprietary graphics card driver ("BGI" = "Borland
> Graphocs Interface") modules, in order actually access the graphics hardware.
> There were drivers at least for CGA, EGA, Hercules, 16-color VGA, and IBM
> 8514/A, and there was also some 3rd-party 256-color VGA driver available for
> the famous "Mode 13h".
> 
> I wouldn't be too surprised if people found a way to provide a BGI driver that
> could open a window of a particular size and use it as a canvas. Heck, I even
> personally wrote a driver for the SuperVGA modes of my own Trident TVGA 8900
> card (except for the blitting operations which I found I didn't need) =B) 

I have several graphics "packages" which use the "Mode 13h" but programs 
compiled
with them, even pre-compiled examples don't work with XP (and I suspect 
the graphics
card I have is also incompatible). The graphics routines in John Beales 
wonderful
heightfield programs don't work, though the rest of the program does.


>> No, but it's fascinating, and in my little experience addictive.
> 
> Don't get *too* addicted to it - it has some bad habits, and its own share of
> being frowned upon :P

I didn't and there's no danger of it now, but I can see how it might be 
easy.
> 
> 

:)David

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