This file is part of Palantir documentation.
Copyright (c) 1998 Dim Zegebart, Russia, Moscow
zager@post.comstar.ru

     Many years ago Mister J.R. Tolkien publish the cult book
'The Lord of the Ring' there was a magic stone called 'Palantir'
The owner of Palantir can view far lands, talk to people on far end and
rule some events remotely.
     Ten yeas ago I read this book. Time passed ...
At the August of 1996 I got the very first connection to Net ...
Month later I found DJGPP site at www.delorie.com
I was developed general purpose comm library using ASM and TurboC
to use it at my work. But benefits which comes from DJGPP were significant,
so I decided to port all my work to this new platform. It was hard, since
my knowledge of protected mode mechanisms was about zero. Fortunately,
I signed to the DJGPP mail list and a bit later get Allegro 2.2 with its
perfect re-entrant hardware interrupt supporting. My work goes faster :)
Keyboard and mouse were handled by Allegro too, so I finished my work
very soon ... and start to enhance my code :) Line by line Palantir comes
to preliminary alpha version 0.1. Any of my attempts to create some
realy multitasking system failed, so first version was just a 'round robin'
dispatcher which collects mouse, keyboard and comms events and calls
my handlers.
It works fine but was ugly as Windows does :) ... Two months later I lost
my HDD :( with no backup of final Palantir code, just some very early version
on floppies. In that time first version of LWP was released by Josh Turpen
and Sengan Short and later Paolo De Marino released PDMLWP - LWP enhancer.
Hura ! This is I missed ! Light Weight Process with real pre-emptieve
multitasking like UNIX does ! Next three months I hacked around PDMLWP
and build second version of Palantir. It was full of bugs and locks system
after ten minutes of work. Since all my work based on Palantir, I spend all
days fixing, fixing ... bugs and adding new features too. Two weeks ago
was born Palantir 0.3 - first working stable version :)

 To be continued ...
