Asynchronous, minimal update display system
Assignee501 Lotus Development Corp.
InventorsDavid Reed, Carolyn J. Boettner
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Abstract
A display management system for use with a computer that includes a display system, the display management system including means for generating a representation of a desired screen image; means for periodically updating the display system to display the desired screen image that corresponds to the state of the representation existing at the time of the update; and means for changing the representation so as to record the cumulative effect of a plurality of successive changes that are made to the desired screen image since the last update of the display system.
Claims33
A display management system for use with a computer that includes a display system, the display management system comprising:
- means for representing an image that is to be displayed on said display system;
- means for periodically updating the display system to display a screen image that corresponds to the state of said image representing means existing at the time of said update;
- and
- means for changing the state of said image representing means in response to the computer's execution of a sequence of command routines after a last update of said display system and prior to the next update of said display system, wherein the computer's execution of each of the command routines of said sequence of command routines modifies information that was displayed on the last update of said display system and said changing means changes the state of said image representing means so as to record a cumulative effect of the execution of said sequence of command routines on the image that was displayed on said display system during the last update, and wherein said updating means performs the update of the display system asynchronously with respect to when said changing means changes the state of said image representing means.
A method for managing a display system on a computer, the method comprising:
- representing an image that is to be displayed on said display system by an image representation;
- periodically updating the display system to display a screen image that corresponds to the state of said image representation existing at the time of said update;
- and
- changing the state of said image representation in response to the computer's execution of a sequence of command routines after a last update of said display system and prior to the next update of said display system, wherein the computer's execution of each of the command routines of said sequence of command routines modifies information that was displayed on the last update of said display system and wherein said changing step changes the state of said image representation so as to record a cumulative effect of the execution of said sequence of command routines on the image that was displayed on said display system during the last update, and wherein said updating step updates the display system asynchronously with respect to when said state changing step changes the state of said image representation.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.