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dignewJan 24, 2011
Interesting article. :)
indigolife06Jan 24, 2011
As usual, Ars Technica does a good job. Lots of images and historical photos too.
fxspec06Jan 24, 2011
That was a long read. I'm almost out of breath..
pflantzdog27Jan 24, 2011
Long and amazing.
santasallyJan 24, 2011
Now I can touch it.
lbubenJan 24, 2011
It really is amazing how much has changed so fast!
annychristianJan 24, 2011
Great..Can you share some more details ?
myztryJan 24, 2011
Great stuff from guys who obviously lived most of it without falling to the hyperbole that everything was Microsoft and Windows, as kids do today.
I'm remembering things like the 1980 Tandy Colour Computer (COCO) that had the word "colour" (yes, the Australian version was spelt that way) besides it was considered revolutionary. And how you could double the processor speed but get a garbled display as the RAM couldn't handle it.
And then the Commodore 64 which made use of raster interrupts to provide scan-line based programmatic effects such as multiplexed sprites, overscan, etc. And the Amiga which had it's own GPU (Blitter) co-processor such that it could even draw filled polygons in hardware, a "copper" processor where with an instruction set allowing you lay out the rastered bitmaps in any way (such as bitmap scrolling without touching video ram), AND a HAM (Hold And Modify) graphics mode that could give an unheard of (at consumer level) 4096 colour image.
They were interestingly challenging times un-obscured by drivers and interfaces into some 3rd party "black box" graphics card maker. You could actually feel part of the whole progression.
god118Jan 24, 2011
lol..