1.2 The idea behind Virtual Panels

My main objective was to write universal tool that would avoid once and for all usually overburdening labor of writing user friendly interface for laboratory applications. In my interests was to design Virtual Panels so that to make its subsequent use as easy as possible. I inclined towards the cheap and restricted in resources IBM AT with single task operating system MS DOS mainly because that is what you find usually in our laboratories. Therefore Virtual Panels was designed with intentions:

* to save memory - for average application you add only about 30K - 50K bytes to your program linking Virtual Panels library.

* to save efforts and time - as many chores as possible are moved into the Virtual Panels core. This leads to the less universality and flexibility but at the same time makes it easier to learn and use Virtual Panels, so applications may be written in less time.

* to save money - hardware demands are modest and most economical.

This guide describes only public data members and public member functions (we call them methods). Other details are available from header files.