10 Apr
1997
10 Apr
'97
2:56 p.m.
On 11-Apr-97, classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu wrote:
Err, didn't I say that (or at least something very like it)?
When I look at the software (and hardware) of
10-15 years ago, I realise
how far _down_ we've gone since then.
Very well put Jim! I know my Amiga 3000, which is my everyday system, doesn't fit into the realm of this group (being
roughly 6 years old), but it
is far superior to modern systems when it comes to usability and efficiency.
Look at the PERQ (OK, so it's my favourite machine, but for a good reason
- it's darn well designed). In 1979 it had a bit-blitter that was capable
of doing 10 full-screen updates every second. The PC didn't get something
like that for a good few years.
Or look at the PDP11's Unibus (or Q-bus). It's elegant. It works. And
there are no IRQ or DMA conflicts. The PC bus is a kludge from start to
finish. If you read the PC/AT TechRef (I have), you'll find there is an
official way to share IRQ lines in a PC/AT - which IBM then ignored when
writing the BIOS. And that's what became the standard.
I remember demonstrating my Tandy CoCo-3 in 1988 to some PC-goon or
other. He had a 386 PC running MS-DOS. I had a 2 mHz 6809 running OS-9. He
was totally amazed that 'that little video game' could have several
programs running at once, displaying their output in different windows
(something his PC didn't do at that time), and that I could even log on to
my machine from a remote terminal.
That is one of the reasons I appreciate the early
micros so much....it's
amazing what was done by programmers and such in such tight constraints. Take
for example the Atari 800...this is a 2mhz 6502 cpu with 48k RAM and a full
Basic, with full-screen editing, in an 8k ROM. This system amazes me at the
animations and such I've seen on it at times. It's version of Frogger is
great, and I typed in a Basic program from 'Compute!' that displayed the Atari
logo with 128 colors onscreen at once. I think modern day systems could still
learn quite a few things from the earlier ones.
I don't play computer games that much, but IMHO the games from 10-15 years
ago are much more fun than the modern ones. OK, so now we have 3D rendered
graphics, real sound effects, but no 'plot' - nothing to do except blast
everything in sight. I personally prefer a good text-only adventure with
some logic behind it, and no sound.
Maybe I'm just totally unusual...
Jeff jeffh(a)eleventh.com
--
-tony
ard12(a)eng.cam.ac.uk
The gates in my computer are AND,OR and NOT, not Bill