Viewing profile — brianpaul

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.

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 pe…

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 fro…

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 Amig…

Google for atari 2600 pacman 4k

Bresenham originally developed the algorithm for drawing lines with a plotter (servos).

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. T…

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.

IIRC, the Atari ROM routines used a different 6-byte BCD floating point format.

Yes! I did a ton of projects in Action! for a number of years. Lots of fun and learned a lot.

I vividly remember spending $180 for the 512K upgrade for my A500. $180 for 512K!!!

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 b…

Converting true=1 to true=~0 is trivial: negate the value, or subtract from zero.

FWIW, I believe Cray had an SSD option for the X-MP back in the early 80s.

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 Reali…

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 i…