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Using a stipple pattern for the background goes back way further than X. IIRC the XEROX GUI had one.
by cmiller1 2y ago
Using a stipple pattern for the background goes back way further than X. IIRC the XEROX GUI had one.
- matttproud 2y agoAuthor here: Thanks for the hint! Do you have an image or two you can cite for this? I'd love to see a representative example of this.
- cmiller1 2y agoYou can see it in this picture: https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-star-8010/xerox-star-8010-04.jpg https://www.digibarn.com/collections/screenshots/xerox-star-...
- matttproud 2y agoThank you so much. This is beautiful example.
- ogurechny 2y agoSingle color or tiled pattern wastes no system memory for background buffers. Color value or bitmap (actual bit map) was written directly to VRAM each time some region needed to be filled with background, and VRAM was the only component that needed to be big enough to hold the screen buffer. A single byte value or a couple of bytes was enough to define the whole background in the program. Later, small tiled bitmaps (pix maps) were used for the same reasons to fill the screen. They were compact enough to fit somewhere in discardable free memory, and also to read from the disk with a single operation, which meant there was no benefit in keeping them in memory backed by swap file. Some modern distributions use programmatic gradient generation for desktop background, though I am not sure whether it still works directly, or simply creates a temporary full screen image in memory, which is no different from using a regular photo.
- kragen 2y agosure, on a 1-bit display the only other options are solid black and solid white
- floren 2y agoWell, you'd want some pattern, because on a 1-bit display your only choices otherwise are pure white or pure black, both of which kind of suck. The Blit terminal also used a stippled pattern, I think the Perq did the same, etc. I think the interesting thing about the X background is that it's not a simple stipple, it's actually a pattern that looks very much like woven fabric.
- crazygringo 2y agoIt is actually a pretty unique pattern. It's not one of the standard patterns that you found, for example, in the original MacPaint: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/aa/MacpaintWP.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/aa/MacpaintWP.pn... And you could set desktop patterns but I can't find any list of what the defaults were: http://applepc.org/assets/system-6-pattern-2.png http://applepc.org/assets/system-6-pattern-2.png I think if you clicked there like arrow buttons it cycled through the defaults. I don't remember them having any pattern that wasn't in MacPaint, though.
- pcwalton 2y agoI think they were all custom patterns specific to MacPaint and the Finder. The QuickDraw manual page 3-7 [1] says there are only five built-in patterns: "white", "black", "gray", "ltGray", and "dkGray". [1]: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/mac/pdf/ImagingWithQuickDraw.pdf https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/ma...
- crazygringo 2y agoTangential, but it's wild to me to see a vector PDF (as opposed to a scan) for a book from 1994! Adobe Acrobat came out in 1993 but it's not like 800-page books were being distributed for it by the following year, at least not that I remember. It's really cool that whatever program that manual was typeset in, someone eventually went back and managed to export the manuscript to PDF. Or, of course, maybe it was output in PostScript originally and they saved that and so a later conversion to PDF was trivial.
- rjsw 2y agoPlus the Macintosh and GEM between the XEROX GUIs and X.