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The message is the medium: Multiprocess structuring of an interactive paint program

Authors:

Richard J. Beach,

John C. Beatty,

Kellogg S. Booth,

Darlene A. Plebon,

Eugene L. FiumeAuthors Info & Claims

SIGGRAPH '82: Proceedings of the 9th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques

Pages 277 - 287

https://doi.org/10.1145/800064.801292

Published: 01 July 1982 Publication History

Abstract

An innovative design for an interactive paint program has been developed based on multiple processes and message passing. Traditional paint programs combine interrupt-driven support of a graphical input device, such as a mouse or tablet, with the coloring of pixels in a raster display. We advocate a different design methodology which is illustrated in our implementation. The multiple processes and message passing primitives provided by some real-time operating systems encourage the design of parallel-program architectures and anthropomorphic programming structures, analogous to artist procedures and the metaphors of Smalltalk.

The Thoth operating system was used to experiment with such an anthropomorphic design. Thoth provides a hospitable environment in which to investigate the distribution of algorithms between software and microprogrammed hardware processes, the performance and responsiveness of a multiple-process interactive program, and experimental user interfaces using an Ikonas 3000 frame buffer.

The paint program consists of processes which handle the graphics tablet, track an iconic cursor, paint a selection of brushes, fill regions of the image, draw lines, and implement the user interface. Some processes have been implemented both in software and microcode.

References

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Beach, R.J., Beatty, J.C., Booth, K.S., White, A.R., "Documentation Graphics at the University of Waterloo," International Conference on Research and Trends in Document Preparation Systems, Swiss Institute of Technology, Lausanne, 1981.

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The message is the medium: Multiprocess structuring of an interactive paint program

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

SIGGRAPH '82: Proceedings of the 9th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques

July 1982

333 pages

ISBN:0897910761

DOI:10.1145/800064

Chairman:
R. Daniel Bergeron

ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Volume 16, Issue 3
July 1982
308 pages
ISSN:0097-8930
DOI:10.1145/965145
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 1982 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGGRAPH: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 July 1982

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SIGGRAPH '82: Computer graphics and interactive techniques

July 26 - 30, 1982

Massachusetts, Boston, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 1,822 of 8,601 submissions, 21%

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Jaggard AKopparty SRamachandran VWright R(2013)The design space of probing algorithms for network-performance measurementACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review10.1145/2494232.246576541:1(105-116)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2494232.2465765
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