clipka wrote:
> Back then, in order to be able to display multiple overlapping application
> windows at once, the solution was that whenever the position of a window would
> change, all windows previously hidden below it but now visible would have to be
> (partially) re-drawn by their respective applications.

That's one solution, but not really because of the memory. The Amiga had 
only 128K or 256K, and it handled clipping windows and saving the clipped 
parts elsewhere just fine. I suspect it was more a question of (a) amount of 
effort put into the graphics layer and (b) the fact that there was no 
hardware accel for Windows boxes so redrawing from scratch was probably 
close to as fast as blitting the saved window anyway.

> I'm not sure if I get all these details right, but stuff along these lines added
> up to make the Windows graphics interface somewhat complicated to use, 

Note that X Windows has all these same problems, except the user has to deal 
with it all. In typical UNIX fashion, X will tell you what the screen looks 
like and expect you to do all the work of making sure you're passing pixels 
in the right format, rather than taking a device-independent drawing command 
and adjusting it to the proper display.

> Yes, nowadays everyone is using 24-bit RGB graphics, and typically at 1:1 pixel
> aspect ratio, but that's something PC-users could only dream of in the early
> days of Windows.

Or even on sophisticated hardware. 1994 or so I needed to do compression 
testing (i.e., figure out whether JPEG works), so I wound up buying a $3000 
graphics board for the Sun workstation so I could see 24-bit color.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

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