david@geaclib.UUCP (David Haynes) (10/02/88)
In article <469@stiatl.UUCP> pda@stiatl.UUCP (Paul Anderson) writes: >Ummm... this is an interesting point. Here at Sales Technologies, we >have a number of people all equipped with PC's and mice and EGAs... >We are going to be getting into X in a big way during the next year. >We also have Phil Karn's source for his PC TCP/IP package and GSS >drivers for EGA's. > I suspect that a long weekend hack >(or 3) is going to result in a PC-XTerminal. Oh, I think it may take a wee bit longer than that. For example, consider the problem of bitmapped scrolling under an EGA card architecture. Three reads to find the byte settings and one write to put the new byte back, all under main processor control. This must make scrolling one of the slowest features around! Of course, clearing the bitmap area and then repainting with the new image might be faster, but if you store the bitmap internally you have the 640K limit to contend with and if you ask for the client to redisplay the image, you have the heavy ethernet traffic to contend with. This is not to say that it is a bad idea to try to get a PC X server (Xerver? ;-) ) going, but to try to point out that it may not be as easy as it first appears. -david- Caveat: I am not familiar with the PC GSS stuff. Can someone outline what it does/is capable of?