A system of graphical manipulation in a potentially windowed data display.

摘要

A method is disclosed which enhances the ability of a digital computer system to manage displays, especially in an environment where a single physical display supports a plurality of logical displays (windows). Machine-language instructions are provided to a CPU (201) from user software and data (208. 217). These instructions act in conjunction with user-supplied form descriptors (209) describing each of the windows to enable management and generation of display image data to be performed directly by the processing hardware of the digital computer system, eliminating any need for intervening interpretive software. The display image data is placed in a screen bitmap memory (215) or a reserve memory (214) for occluded image data. Data computed from form descriptors may be held in a cache (206) in order to enhance the speed of consecutive operations on windows. Graceful creation is enhanced by permitting processing control to escape to software fault handlers (211).