Your explanation shows your experience Brian. It took me quite some time to figure that out. The SMG$ manual is a far cry from a tutorial. I managed to write games like mastermind and a word guessing game called Lingo with the aid of SMG$ routines. I like Pascal because it is a descendant of Algol, the first language I learned at school. Dijkstra was a professor there which explains Algol and Burroughs. The Pascal VMS Compilers never failed me though the RTL bindings with all those attributes in brackets felt strange and somewhat like a kludge. When I installed the compiler for the first time on one of my own systems I learned that the .pen files were part of the kit. Before I had written my own and that probably explains the problems to make SMG$ work :) Van: Brian Schenkenberger, VAXman- Verzonden: dinsdag 1 oktober 2013 19:46 Aan: hecnet at Update.UU.SE Beantwoorden: hecnet at Update.UU.SE Onderwerp: Re: [HECnet] FMS, SMG$, Windowing/Forms on a Text Terminal Hans Vlems <hvlems at zonnet.nl> writes: The pasteboard is the terminal screen. Not a difficult concept. You can, normally, only create one pasteboard per terminal. With the aid of a VMS pseudo-terminal, you can circumvent this restriction. Displays are "virtual terminals" of any size you declare them to be. You then position these on the pasteboard with SMG$PASTE_VIRTUAL_DISPLAY giving the coordinates of where you want the display pasted. Most other SMG$ APIs work upon the virtual display(s). As for DEC Pascal, I know not. Despite Mr. Reagan's affection for it and his claims that it's one of the better VMS compilers, I've never used it. For SMG$, all you really need is a way to pass by reference (pointer) and the ability to define string descriptors. I thought that Pascal created string descriptors by default for its character strings. I prefer to use Macro when I call SMG$. C can also be used but you need to roll your own descriptors. Fortran, as I recall, also had native descriptor creation in its compiler. -- VAXman- A Bored Certified VMS Kernel Mode Hacker VAXman(at)TMESIS(dot)ORG Well I speak to machines with the voice of humanity.