3 Dec
2007
3 Dec
'07
4:32 p.m.
On 3 Dec 2007 at 18:05, Jim Battle wrote:
Matrox S-100 graphics cards appear once in a while on
ebay. They made
character generators and bitmapped displays as well. They could be
ganged to make grayscale, or even palettized color, and they made it
easy to sync them so you could overlay graphics and text.
...and there were others besides the usual gang of Polymorphic,
Cromemco, Vector and North Star. Not rare, just uncommon.
I remember one very nice one (or set)--the MicroAngelo from Scion.
Initially a monochrome version with its own Z80, I think later
editions included multiple planes for color. Very nice and very
expensive.
One of the problems was the terminal-centric view--i.e. many S100
boxes simply communicated with a terminal over a serial link--far too
slow for decent graphics, although there were color graphics
terminals. And CP/M knew nothing of graphics; there was no
"standard" graphics interface as there was on, say the Apple II or
the PC, so applications software was a problem.
What is hard to appreciate from this time is how revolutionary any
sort of non-TTY interface software was. WordStar, for example, was a
real eye-opener--you hit ctrl-Y to delete a line and it vanished from
the display and succeeding lines scrolled up to close up the gap.
Amazing!
Real meaningful graphics applications would have to wait a bit to
become the rule, rather than the exception. Certainly, larger
memory spaces and faster CPUs didn't hurt.
Cheers,
Chuck