Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Technology Stocks : Microsoft vs. Linux -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: dybdahl who wrote (9)	2/1/2001 11:14:59 PM
From: Andy Thomas	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32

one thing which really irked me about win95, was the way they started clearly the keyboard buffer after an alt-tab, but before the new, desired window was 're-loaded.' to this day i alt-tab to a dos box, start typing in the command, and by the time the dos box comes up, the first letter or two of the command are lost. this never happened under win3.1. i like your ideas about making money with linux. myself, i need to learn to program using ncurses. i would like to write a series of text-mode apps, including games. i have faith that there are enough people out there who still enjoy text mode, that writing apps and games would not be a waste of time. do you know whether ncurses is quick to write to the screen? under dos you simply designated a pointer to the video card's text mode address and set the values for the various screen 'cells,' using offsets from that pointer (xB000 if memory serves). andy

To: dybdahl who wrote (9)	2/1/2001 11:20:02 PM
From: Andy Thomas	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32

one thing silverberg did do (which i was thankful for since i was using the same app), was he insisted that his 'tapcis' (automated compuserve text mode app) worked under win95. this helped ensure a lowest-common denominator for servicing text-based comm apps at the time. as bad as the win95 comm driver may have been, at least silverberg ensured through his use of tapcis - and pointing out to the developers problems he found - that it would work to some degree. when i realized the vp was using tapcis, it kind of gave me a lift. so many of the muckety-mucks there had gone 'graphical' by then. there was this huge influx of college grads who'd never seen a command line. 5 or 6 years after my college command line training, the 'starry-eyed' who showed up at msft had me feeling like and 'old codger.' i'm glad that linux/unix is validating the command line paradigm. when i first hit alt-f2 in linux i was overjoyed; multitasking without that accursed gui. andy