Presentation manager
The Presentation Manager (PM) ( German: Presentation Manager ) together with the Workplace Shell ( German: Work surface ) forms the object-oriented graphical user interface of the IBM OS / 2 operating system . The Presentation Manager is responsible for the graphic display of elements such as windows, dialogs and menus, for processing inputs via mouse and keyboard and for communication between window-based programs. The Workplace Shell (WPS) is based on the Presentation Manager. Your job is to represent most of the system components, drives, files, directories, etc. as objects so that users can interact with them. The Presentation Manager can, however, also be operated with other shells.
history
Presentation Manager (code name: Winthorn) was mainly developed by IBM Hursley Labs (UK). It was a mixture of Microsoft Windows and the IBM mainframe graphics system GDDM . Similar to Windows, it was message-based, with many messages also being identical. The first version of Presentation Manager, which was adopted from Windows 2.0, was shipped in 1988 with the OS / 2 1.1 operating system.
Technical details
PM follows the interface description Common User Access (CUA). Mouse actions for copying and pasting text are also allowed.
The single input queue (SIQ) was a major problem : a non-responding application could block the processing of user interface messages and freeze the graphic display. A later OS / 2 FixPak solved this problem by using a timer to determine when the application stopped responding to events.
literature
- Harvey M. Deitel, Michael S. Kogan: The Design of OS / 2 . Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Reading, Mass. 1992. 389 pp. ISBN 0-201-54889-5 .