A Sealed Mystery From 1984 - The IBM PC Graphical File System |

What happened when you go searching through eBay and find a strange and mysterious IBM branded package? Well, you go out, buy it, dump it, and then spend the better part of a month researching it. Obviously this is a lesson to be more careful on my eBay purchases!
To be honest, the name itself is interesting, after all, just what is a 'Graphical File System', and what are these ANSI Metafiles the box talks about? Here in 2020, we're going to crack the shrinkwrap of this 36 year old mystery, and unbox it live on camera. Inside that box that has sat sealed for over 30 years, I found a few floppy disks, and more than a few questions.
As it would turn out, I would end up end up following a rabbit hole that went back years upon years to ANSI's original efforts to standard computer graphics in the form of Graphical Kernel System, but with a nearly useless manual, lost software, and a rare add-on that I only knew about by watching one of LGR's videos, I knew I was going to have a tough time ahead of me.
There's little information on IBM's Professional Graphics System, or the Professional Graphics Controller, so
In truth, this video has been the works since early November, and it took me that long to put everything together
NCommander Links:
Twitter: / fossfirefighter
Discord: / discord
Blog: casadevall.pro/
Music is from www.epidemicsound.com, with the following tracks used in order:
- The Mole - Christoffer Moe Ditlevsen
- Infiltrator - Christoffer Moe Ditlevsen
- Perjury - Dream Cave
- A Travelers' Gloom - Dew Of Light
- Tragedy Unfolds - Dream Cave
- What We Discovered - Philip Ayers
- Cryptic Secrecy - Dream Cave
- Person of Interest - Dream Cave
- Rescue Mission - Lupus Nocte
Although this video was released before I was aware of #DOSCember, I've retroactively added that hash tag since it does indeed fall under the subject! It's great that so many people are coming together to help celebrate the legacy of DOS, so here's my own part of that!

[@NCommander]

Somehow, despite watching this video dozens of times, and letting a few folks see it before hand, I managed to ship it with a major overlay typo. It's "Application", past me >.<

[@GetOffMyyLawn]

This almost sounds like something IBM built for a big firm like Boeing to allow them to share and print designs on their different plotters and pc's... and then repackaged it as a "generic" solution.... along with consulting hours to get it working.

[@tschak909]

The thing to really understand here: GKS was an honest early attempt at devising a cross platform retargetable graphics system. There were GKS implementations for a smattering of different systems, the common thread being that the application code and libraries were in C. You could write a graphical program once, and take it over to a SUN workstation, or to an Apollo system, or to a PC, or to a Lisa, compile it, and it would run, reformatting itself for whatever output you wished. At least, that was the theory.

[@thegorn]

Ten minutes in I ask myself, “why am I watching this?”

[@vertecies]

Take your papers and go to local printing shop they do paper to digital scan with professional printers, office grade ones. It takes less than 10 minutes and maybe page is ten cents. IBM stuff is archived in their corporate archives. They got patents for that and it is their intelectual property. What you have there is desktop environment, just IBM take on it with hardware support. Terminal is in 2D. Modern hardware gives 2in1 2d and 3d. All linux depend on 2d. No hardware no display even 2d terminal text mode.

[@Jason-fp7vi]

You're an international treasure for archiving this and making a video about it. Great video

[@tschak909]

This is literally an early implementation of GKS. Digital Research also implemented a version of this called GSX, which would become the basis for VDI in GEM. The API calls are almost exactly the same.

[@maedero05]

Apple, Microsoft, IBM all have there basic graphical commands like the Xerox printer menu´s wich where adopted as the GUI for mac and windows and OS/2 !

[@logsupermulti3921]

It's weird to think about that before GCC and Co. you generally had to pay for compilers. Something I take for granted now I guess.

[@RWebster325]

As for a scanner, why don't you acquire a copier/printer with a double-sided automatic document feeder (ADF)? Make sure that the ADF has been serviced before use, when excessively worn, they tend to eat what they are fed or jam.

[@DrDavesDiversions]

3:11

[@thequux1]

For scanning, I recommend getting either one or two (if you want to "scan" hardcover manuals) cheap used DSLR's (DSLR because the optics and sensors tend to be

[@NicoDsSBCs]

I enjoyed watching this. Great content. I was a programmer in the late 90's and early 2000's. I loved it back then. I wrote a lot of code for early neural networks.

[@doc_sav]

Man, good eye spotting the PGC from a brief glimpse in a manual, and catching that it was in that PC Reset picture. Also, as someone who works with some very big legacy systems, I am always fascinated with what gets left out of contemporary documents because at the time it seemed axiomatic and not worth putting down. Like what things are, and what they actually do.

[@BritishBeachcomber]

This really takes me back. BRIEF was an awesome text editor in it's day. With unix-like regular expressions and global search and replace!

[@BlackDragon-xn2ww]

flatbed scanners are somewhat rare these days sure can still find them at yard sales but I find a HP printer scanner combo works just as well

[@chriswatson2407]

You didn't have the whole, only a hole. Great work.

[@DavidHembrow]

I used to use Lattice C both on a 68k system and the Microsoft branded version for the PC. It was well thought of at the time, but we didn't have many choices. The earlier versions were strictly K&R C, so no function prototypes etc You needed something like Lint with compilers like that to check for errors which the compiler could not report, but unfortunately Lint was not available to me on the systems I was using.

[@alextirrellRI]

For scanning, I'd suggest trying to find a multifunction scanner that supports duplex/two sided scanning via the feeder. The latest version of Acrobat also is smart enough to let you scan all the pages on one side and then do the other and puts them in the correct order afterwards.

[@DrDavesDiversions]

Happy holidays! I added this to a "Programming