Universal graphics terminal.
Posted: Mon Aug 26, 2013 9:44 pm
Hello, first post here (Some may know me as Ryan_Burnside from the #Lisp channel)
I've had an idea rolling around in my head for some time.
In the late 70's and 80's there were graphics terminals.
They worked like our current text terminals but allowed ANY language to draw shapes to the screen and have a basic GUI.
If you're not familiar with how terminals work, they usually accept plain ASCII control codes which move the cursor around and color text (vt100/vt102 is the defacto standard)
Now I know this is slow but it still works very well today.
I'm wondering why the notion of graphics terminals was never really revived?
I mean it would essentially allow the programmer to produce a GUI in ANY programming language that can write the the standard output.
Standards exist like ReGIS but it seems that nobody has written a working emulator for some time.
It would be a grand unification for all programming languages, especially those that lack current GUI support.
In any programming language you'd only need to write a small library to print the control codes...
Esentially you could write two versions, one for X11 and one for the screenbuffer (without needing an X11 server running)
Take a look at the video below, this should wet your whistle a bit.
Here is a video of a VT330 terminal rendering some lines...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=p ... mrmj5y72kg
I've had an idea rolling around in my head for some time.
In the late 70's and 80's there were graphics terminals.
They worked like our current text terminals but allowed ANY language to draw shapes to the screen and have a basic GUI.
If you're not familiar with how terminals work, they usually accept plain ASCII control codes which move the cursor around and color text (vt100/vt102 is the defacto standard)
Now I know this is slow but it still works very well today.
I'm wondering why the notion of graphics terminals was never really revived?
I mean it would essentially allow the programmer to produce a GUI in ANY programming language that can write the the standard output.
Standards exist like ReGIS but it seems that nobody has written a working emulator for some time.
It would be a grand unification for all programming languages, especially those that lack current GUI support.
In any programming language you'd only need to write a small library to print the control codes...
Esentially you could write two versions, one for X11 and one for the screenbuffer (without needing an X11 server running)
Take a look at the video below, this should wet your whistle a bit.
Here is a video of a VT330 terminal rendering some lines...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=p ... mrmj5y72kg