Purely historic question: VT200 text graphic programming

[GrayShark]

On Thu, 10 Mar 2011 18:02:41 +0000, Grant Edwards wrote:

> On 2011-03-10, Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam at whitemice.org> wrote:
>> On Thu, 2011-03-10 at 00:38 -0600, GrayShark wrote:
>>> Once, many, many, years ago, I programmed some type of 'graphical'
>>> interface on a VT200 terminal (only DEC VAX/VMS programmers are going
>>> to know what this is). Question. What was the library I linked
>>> against? Yes, you remember, painting boxes with ascii and the superset
>>> of ascii.
>>
>> It was curses [ these days people typically use "ncurses" ].
> 
> Curses that can't be what the OP is referring to.
> 
> Curses wasn't a VAX/VMS thing, it was a Unix thing (that has been ported
> to other platforms as well).  VMS did have it's own text-screen-widget
> library sort of like curses+panel, but I don't remember what it was
> called.  Some googling coughs up FMS and DECforms.  I vageuly remember
> using one or the other, but that was a long time ago (25 years).
> 
> At first first I thought he was talking about ReGIS, but that wasn't
> available on the vt200 (it was on vt240/330/340).

Actually it was curses; it came with the C compiler. What was more 
entertaining was that I using a legacy Fortran program, DEC Fortran 
(actually had pointers!) and linking to a C curses interface.

Most exciting. The rest of the project was about realtime data collect
and processing on a microvax III. In the mid-90, that wasn't doable at
1 milliscond time steps. VMS was just not realtime aware.

GrayShark.