The workstation concept of GKS and the resulting conceptual differences to the GSPC core system

Abstract

GKS has evolved from a long process of national /1,2,3,4/ and international /5,6/ discussion on standardization of graphical systems. One of the basic principles of the Graphical Kernel System GKS is the concept of workstations that are used to address a display terminal with several input devices. This is a basic conceptual difference to the GSPC core system /6/, which will be discussed in this paper.A workstation represents a collection of graphical devices that are operated in a coordinated fashion by an operator at a given site. The whole workstation is treated in GKS as one logical unit.GKS features two dimensional output to and input from single or multiple workstations. Besides basic line drawing primitives raster graphics primitives are supported. The coordinates are transformed in a two-stage transformation process where the first stage can be set for each primitive and the second can be set for each workstation. Furthermore the setting of a workstation specific pen and text table allows control of the appearance of all primitives on the corresponding workstation.A segment facility provides means for structuring a picture in subparts. Segments may be created and deleted, the segment attributes may be dynamically modified, and the segments may be transformed. They can be displayed simultaneously or alternatively on different workstations. A device independent segment storage serves for inserting segments into other segments.Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given chat copying is by permission of the Association for Computing Machinery. To copy otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or specific permission. 01980 ACM 0-89791-021-4/80/0700-226 $00.75 Content indicators (i)

Structured Graphics for Distributed Systems

“…Together, they are similar to a number of existing graphics systems [25], including those conforming to the ISO standard Graphical Kernel System (GKS) [14,22,34,54,58] and the proposed Core standard [29]. The VGTP bears an even greater resemblance to the proposed PHIGS standard [2], which was developed at approximately the same time.…”

The detailed semantics of graphics input devices

“…A fundamental concept of GKS is the workstation [4], a collection of input and output facilities, treated as a unit by the application program, forming a single logical channel of communication to the user. An application may drive many workstations, several of which may support one or more logical input devices.…”

The detailed semantics of graphics input devices

“…A fundamental concept of GKS is the workstation [4], a collection of input and output facilities, treated as a unit by the application pro-gram, forming a single logical channel of communication to the user. An application may drive many workstations, several of which may support one or more logical input devices.…”