An object-oriented view system controls the display of screen graphics for a plurality of application programs, each of which generates graphical information for display in a window assigned to it. The view system has a system window manager which is common to all of the application programs and which defines application window areas on the display screen and corresponding application window storage areas in the display screen buffer. Each application program instantiates a view system object from class information in the computer operating system. Each view system object includes a view object with program code that directly stores screen display information generated by the application into the screen buffer. This arrangement allows the application programs to avoid the conventional "bottleneck" that develops when all of the screen display information must be stored in the screen buffer by the common system window manager.