box-drawing characters

[Paul Edwards]

In another forum (an Amiga forum), someone suggested that
one of the reasons why the Amiga couldn't easily replace the
IBM PC was because it didn't have the box-drawing characters
in the default character set.

This was the first time that I had ever been made aware that the
box drawing characters were potentially of critical importance -
allowing a GUI-like environment using text.

It's unclear to me why you can't reproduce that same functionality
using the innate graphics - I'm talking about reproducing for no
additional cost than the text characters would cost in development
time or hardware performance.

I have previously mentioned that for Vietnamese I would like
something like VISCII, but I want to take 6 control characters
that don't interfere with micro-emacs keystrokes.

To support box drawing on top of VISCII-like, I would need to
take even more control characters - but these can likely be
output-only, so there is no problem if they clash with a micro-emacs
keystroke.

The MSDOS 4.0 source code appears to have box-drawing characters
in some of the files, expressed as UTF-8. This is now difficult to edit,
and it was difficult to edit even before.

I think there needs to be a system where you draw your boxes using
just asterisks, ie:

******
* *
* *
******

(or whatever)

and then it is up to some software to convert your box into the proper
box-drawing characters on a system that supports that, or else literally
leaves the original asterisks.

Any thoughts on the way forward, starting at around 1983, before the
Amiga has debuted?

Thanks. Paul.

[Luke A. Guest]

Post by Paul Edwards
In another forum (an Amiga forum), someone suggested that
one of the reasons why the Amiga couldn't easily replace the
IBM PC was because it didn't have the box-drawing characters
in the default character set.

No, it was closer to no-MMU in most machines. If they'd not been
cheapskates and put in an MMU, they could've had memory protection from
the start. Also not being in a hurry for CES (or whatever it was) and
waiting for CAOS to be written, would've helped.

But then, so would not hiring a shit ton of PC management to sell PC's
instead of hiring more Amiga staff. So would not having dickheads in
management who live on a fucking plane who hired another dickhead who
destroyed the company.

[wolfgang kern]

On 20/08/2024 23:04, Paul Edwards wrote:
[about character font set]

Post by Paul Edwards
Any thoughts on the way forward, starting at around 1983, before the
Amiga has debuted?

back then I wrote many inline ASM in BASIC for C64.
including my very own character-set to show my logo with a triple char.

during DOS days I used FONTEDIT.COM to adapt my stuff.

I use this 128 characters font layout still today,
but added up to 256 chars and flexibility for various
sizes, while the main grid is 16*8(*9 as hidden space).
__
wolfgang