brianpaul

8 ms·

1.
by brianpaul 1mo ago
Though, if you happen to be dividing by constants, compilers can do a good job of optimizing for that, simd too probably.
2.
by brianpaul 11mo ago
This reminds me of how expensive RAM was back then. I remember spending $180 to add 512KB to my Amiga 500 in 1988 or so. $180 was a lot of money back then.
3.
by brianpaul 1y ago
IIRC, one of the 8-bit Atari magazines had an article describing a similar setup back in the mid/later 80s. Basically, put a photoresistor in a shroud (I used the cap from a Bic pen and some electrical tape), attach it to the dot matr
4.
by brianpaul 1y ago
Chess? Wow. I did some 6502 programming in hex on my Atari 800XL, but just for simple things like display list interupts. I had a list of all the 6502 opcodes and hex encodings from a magazine or book and figured it out from there.
5.
by brianpaul 1y ago
I loved programming in Action! The editor was great and both compilation and runtime were really fast. I used it for several years from high school into college until I got an Amiga. I wrote a paint program, 3D modeler and 3D renderer wi
6.
by brianpaul 2y ago
Google for atari 2600 pacman 4k
7.
by brianpaul 4y ago
Bresenham originally developed the algorithm for drawing lines with a plotter (servos).
8.
by brianpaul 4y ago
I have an SGI price sheet from July 1993. A 4xR4400/150Mhz, 64MB Onyx RealityEngine2 went for $199,999. Adding 64MB RAM cost another $11,000. The GE board had 12 i860 processors. The big rack-based system w/ 24 CPUs was $634,9
9.
by brianpaul 5y ago
I concur. My childhood LEGO from 1980-ish (now my son's) have noticeable color and fit variation. Still usable, but definitely not as nice as the new stuff.
10.
by brianpaul 5y ago
IIRC, the Atari ROM routines used a different 6-byte BCD floating point format.
11.
by brianpaul 5y ago
Yes! I did a ton of projects in Action! for a number of years. Lots of fun and learned a lot.
12.
by brianpaul 6y ago
I vividly remember spending $180 for the 512K upgrade for my A500. $180 for 512K!!!
13.
by brianpaul 7y ago
I think there's kind of two aspects to that (why client/server): 1. The X protocol was roughly like an evolution of the VT-like protocols which were used for text-based terminals back in the day. Those protocols supported cursor
14.
by brianpaul 7y ago
Converting true=1 to true=~0 is trivial: negate the value, or subtract from zero.
15.
by brianpaul 7y ago
FWIW, I believe Cray had an SSD option for the X-MP back in the early 80s.
16.
by brianpaul 8y ago
OpenGL actually had support for color index rendering. See glIndexi(), glClearIndex(), etc. I think it was primarily used for hardware overlay planes on graphics systems like RealityEngine.
17.
by brianpaul 8y ago
1991: SGI 4D/340 with VGX gfx, 4x MIPS R3000, 64MB RAM, 700MB disk: $180,000. I sometimes laugh to myself when people complain about the price of GPUs. Yes, $10,000 is a lot, but in historical context, it's pretty reasonable for