Things I've learned building a modern TUI Framework (2022)

Anyone old and naiv enough to share this observation: Almost everything I looked at after TurboVision was inspired, but actually not really finished. Once you take the toolkit for a ride, you realize its kind of cute but unfinished. Maybe another way of looking at this is to call many of the TUI frameworks I say "opinionated", whatever that exactly means.

I am likely just dense and uncreative, but the truth is, when I switched from DOS to Linux in the 90s, I was never again as productive as I happened to be with B800. Granted, it likely took me a long time to understand the need for double buffering and the difference between a local/direct text mode vs a terminal, let alone escape sequences. But still. Whenever I tried to do something directly in ncurses, I pretty much gave up due to a distinct feeling of being unhappy. Completely different to what I was able to do with the simple ideal of B800.

I get what Turbo Vision is (was), but what's that B800 thing? Surely you aren't talking about a Celeron processor? Seems tricky to google, also no Wiki page on that. You got me curious, plz spill it! =)

In real mode addressing and graphic card in text mode, your video memory started at absolute address 0xb800:0x0000. It was an two-dimensional array, where you could poke and whatever you changed here, was reflected immediately on the display. Each element of the array was two bytes: character itself and color attributes.

I think it is also 0xb800 as it is a physical address; not ionly in real mode.

For physical linear address, it would be one digit (4-bits) longer (-> 0xb8000); when the segment:offset is combined, the result is 20-bit address.