Re: Start me up -Reply

[Tod Landis <landis@cruzio.com>]

  Sam,
  
  Could you describe what benefits, if any,
  you expect the ANSI/ISO standards to provide
  Microsoft competitors or customers?
  
  Years ago a Microsoft representative, John Butler,
  chaired the ANSI graphics standards committee
  responsible for drafting what were then called the
  Virtual Device Interface (VDI) and Virtual Device
  Metafile (VDM) standards.  I recall Gates calling
  attention to Microsoft's involvement in the ANSI
  standards efforts at early Windows press conferences.
  
  Now, among other things, the committee drafted bindings
  of CGI to various programming languages, the C language
  included.  One benefit of these shared, cross-platform
  bindings was that graphics applications written for
  one platform, say Windows, could be ported to another,
  say Unix, without too much effort.
  
  Of course, the real MS Windows graphics interface, or GDI,
  was quite a bit different
  from the "standard" bindings. Porting a VDI application
  to GDI would not be too difficult, but going the other way
  was a lot harder.  Kind of like the way MSDOS worked with
  PCDOS, or pure Java works with Microsoft Java.
  
  It runs through my mind that these recurring patterns
  are not accidental.
  
  Tod Landis
  
  Sam Goodhope wrote:
  
  > Now that we are over introductions, I would like to throw out a
  > substantive issue--the ISO's standardization process regarding Java.
  > What's up with the recent US vote against Java?  How does ANSI fit into
  > the ISO picture?  Who is on the "JC-1" committee?
  > .-