Presentation Manager

The Presentation Manager (PM ) ( German: Presentation Manager), together with the Workplace Shell ( German: work surface ) the object-oriented graphical user interface of the operating system IBM OS / 2 Here, the Presentation Manager for the graphical representation of elements such as windows, dialogs and menus for the processing of entries via mouse and keyboard as well as for communication between window-based programs is responsible. The Workplace Shell (WPS ) uses the Presentation Manager on. Your task is, etc. represent most of the components of the system, drives, files, directories, as an object, so that users can interact with them. The Presentation Manager can also be operated with other shells.

History

Presentation Manager (Code Name: Winthorn ) was developed mainly at the IBM Hursley Labs ( UK). It was a mixture of Microsoft Windows and the IBM mainframe graphics system GDDM dar. Similarly, it was Windows message-based, with many messages were also identical. The first version of Presentation Manager 1988 comes with the operating system OS / 2 1.1.

Technical details

PM follows the Interface Description Common User Access ( CUA). There are also mouse actions for copying and pasting text allowed.

A major problem was the Single Input Queue ( SIQ ): A non -responding application could block the execution of the user interface messages, and thus freeze the graph screen. A later OS/2-FixPak solved this problem by using a timer to determine the time point at which the application stops responding to events.