O/T - I was a user on one of those Tektronix displays from about 1979 to
1982, but no 3277 or mainframe. Mine was connected to a DEC computer,
all put together by a company called ComputerVision.
This pic shows almost exactly what I used:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computervision#/media/File:Computervision_piping.agr.jpg
On 8/31/2021 8:24 PM, Charles Bailey wrote:
Back in the 1980's, when I was using MVS full time, we had some
Tektronix graphics displays connected to an adapter on some of our 3277
terminals. These displays had storage screens where the screen could
only have new stuff written to it. When the display got too cluttered
you would have to tell the software to clear the screen and redraw it.
We had a few application programs that made use of these displays.
Later, in the 90's we got some new displays that had more conventional
display tubes with hardware that more or less emulated the old Tektronix
displays so that the same software would work with them. At one time I
had a PS/2 with a microchannel adapter card that would interface with
these new displays. I understand that the x3270 terminal emulator
program for Unix-like systems has a mode that emulates the 3277 graphics
in a separate window. Some of the graphics programs used a routine
called GAPE that accepted function calls from the application and
generated the drawing data stream to the display. Is GAPE available
somewhere?
GAPE was written by the same person who wrote CLIC. There was a chapter
in the CLIC user manual that explained the use of GAPE. The author
explained that he didn't like the graphics support program that IBM
supplied with the PRPQ graphics attachment so he wrote his own. (Maybe
that was the GASP you were referring to.) I believe the user manual
contained the source code for playing checkers, written in CLIC, as a
demo of how to use GAPE. At some point, when PL/AS was my primary
programming language, I rewrote the checkers program in PL/AS as an
exercise in learning to call GAPE from a PL/AS program.
I originally posted this on the h390-...@groups.io news group and
someone there suggested that I post a query here.
Charles Bailey
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