Graphic characters in Norton Utilities SYS-V

[Tom Neff]

In article <1990Jul27.104059.12955 at pegasus.com> richard at pegasus.com (Richard Foulk) writes:
>>In the current version of the Utilities, if a full-screen program sees that
>>it's running on a mappable screen, it goes into a special high-performance
>>mode that writes directly to the screen and has the line-drawing characters
>>hard-coded in ...
>
>What in the world did you gain by talking directly to the screen?  A little
>speed?!  Or was the idea to make the package non-portable?

No big mystery here.  It's called PC-ITIS.  A generation of spoiled PC
software vendors has staked its product value and market share on the
ability to twiddle the hardware for pretty pictures and funny sounds.
Now with the rise of UNIX 386 they have this dream segment of users
running on PC-"like" machines with UNIX class budgets.  Finally, they
figure, they can "move up" without sacrificing the all important window
dressing and gingerbread.  Result: little smiley faces and maps of New
Jersey boop-ing and queep-ing all over the place, instead of
straightforward portable functionality.  And blank screens on otherwise
compatible UNIX boxes nationwide.

It's the silly phenomenon of the "full screen graphics CHDIR command"
all over again.

-- 
I'm a Leo.  Leos don't believe    *  *  *     Tom Neff
    in this astrology stuff.        *  *  *   tneff at bfmny0.BFM.COM