Graphic characters in Norton Utilities SYS-V

[Karl Lehenbauer]

Programs that directly went to display memory rather than through the BIOS
are the number one reason why the capabilities of MS-DOS have been so slow
to evolve.

Yes, on the original PC because the BIOS was poorly written, display I/O was
very slow.  But because of this crufty hack, tens of millions of people sit
running one task at a time on machines perfectly capable of useful 
multitasking.

Now people who have cut their eyeteeth in the environment-of-the-crufty-hack
bring their malodorous workarounds to Unix, an OS that, having evolved in
an environment where memory mapping and protection were omnipresent, never
really provided people with much incentive to do weird hacks that boosted
performance of specific programs while encumbering the OS developers with
the need to provide backward compatibility to their funky kludges, and we
are to bless it?  No way.  If you want to make display update faster, do
it at the driver level so every program can take advantage of it.  Otherwise,
stick to the problem at hand, namely, your application, and do not gratuitously
bypass the OS.

-- 
-- uunet!ficc!karl  	"I am here by the will of the people and I won't leave
   uunet!sugar!karl	 until I get my raincoat back." -- Metrophage