Porting UNIX Applications to the Mac
Matt Landau
mlandau at Diamond.BBN.COM
Tue Sep 16 02:19:35 AEST 1986
In article <1091 at hoptoad.uucp> tim at hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) writes:
>
>Briefly, the problem is this. On the Mac, all user applications are graphic
>applications. On UNIX, very few applications use graphics beyond those
>attainable on a hardcopy character-graphics terminal.
>
>To make matters worse, it is impossible to just change the applications to
>use a bitmapped user-friendly interface. One of the great strengths of UNIX
>is the ability to create multi-process programs, even on the fly, by using
>pipes and i/o redirection to chain together multiple programs. This is made
>possible only because of the use of a character-stream, non-graphics
>interface for most applications.
There was a very interesting presentation at this year's Summer Usenix
on communicating data between processes in different windows existing
in a graphical user environment. It was called "A Data-Flow Manager for
an Interactive Programming Environment", and was given by Paul Haeberli
of Silicon Graphics. The accompanying paper may be found in your local
copy of the 1986 Summer Usenix Proceedings. The system amounted to a
way to pipe data between graphical manipulation and display programs, and
provided a user-interface that made specifications of input and output
sources easy (lines and arrows, etc.)
--
Matt Landau BBN Laboratories, Inc.
mlandau at diamond.bbn.com 10 Moulton Street, Cambridge MA 02238
...harvard!diamond.bbn.com!mlandau (617) 497-2429
More information about the Comp.unix
mailing list