What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS 2120

On Thu, 01 Sep 2005 14:04:39 +0000, greymaus

The CLI had been resembling UNIX since 1985. Can you be a little more specific? The addition of the PIPE: device, perhaps? The addition of aliases for "list" and "copy" of "ls" and "cp"? The increasing power of the shell, such as command history? With the exception, perhaps, of the aliases, all of the things I mentioned above were IMHO enhancements to functionality.

Well, that's a complicated subject. By the time AmigaOS 3.0 rolled around, the NTSC-PAL-video-centric display system was a bit long in the tooth. So, the OS developed a standardized way to deal with various screen modes, and built new hooks in Intuition to handle those different display modes, but still it was Intuition handling them. (For those unfamiliar with Amiga, Intuition is roughly analogous to X, or QuickDraw, or Display Postscript: it's the OS layer that handles graphics output.) The information about each mode was available: progressive-interlaced, horizontal-vertical scan rate, color depth, available resolutions for visible screen size and for scrollable desktops larger than the visible screen size. Intuition used that new data in figuring out how to draw the same old primitives. RastPort, ClipRect, layers, bitplanes versus chunky pixels -- it was all available. Adding a graphics card meant that you added a standard monitor driver that went in the DEVS:Monitorsdrawer just like any other, and it was added to the list of available display modes.

Saying you don't want to deal with dozens of display mechanisms doesn't really make sense to me.