CompuServe Messages

Not quite. 3DS is constantly updating that little red status bar and the rest of said display while it's rendering, and that's GUI stuff. Not much, mind you, but it IS there. And a GUI operating system is not a function of the CPU itself (GUIs exist even for the 1MHz 6502-based C-64 — GEOS was originally for the C-64 and 128 and later the Apple II before it ever appeared as GEOworks on the PC). Modern UNIXs almost all have GUI front-ends, but they are just that: front ends, just like Windows is to DOS. They are NOT the OS. UNIX works just fine on a plain dumb ASCII terminal connected to a mainframe, with absolutely no graphics ability whatsoever. Macs don't have a text mode, but that's not because of the 68000, but rather it's because the Mac video hardware has no text mode (text modes are actually more complex to implement, since the data sent to the screen has to go through TWO memory locations to get there for any given pixel: the ASCII character code stored in the character screen map, and the shape of that character stored in the character-generator ROM [or optionally loaded into RAM in the case of the EGA, VGA, C-64, C-128, Apple ///, the old Hercules InColor and Hercules Monochrome Plus, etc.], whereas for graphics modes only one memory location [or group] has to be accessed for each pixel.). 68000-based computers such as the TRS-80 Model 16 and the Tandy 6000 did have a text mode, and indeed it is the native mode of the operating system (a UNIX clone). There is no reason that a 3DS rendering engine couldn't be made that runs in text mode and renders to a non-display buffer, with text-based status displays. Such a renderer would be far more likely to be able to run in the background under Windows (which can't multitask DOS graphics programs in the background, but can multitask DOS text-based programs in the background). Granted, the rendering would be slower, but rendering could go on while you're doing something else with the same computer: say, getting Compuserve messages with WinCIM or Navigator. Hopefully, 3DS rendering modules, text-only or otherwise, will be made for the various non-Intel chips out there, that would work with Network Rendering.