The 3dfx Voodoo1

I think this is partly because things have gotten vastly more complex & abstract, and none of that complexity and abstraction has been managed well. We basically always say "Yes right away" to increased complexity/abstraction these days when PM wants something.

Tech debt was lower back then.. maybe all of our practices were worse, but the code bases were thousands of times smaller which made up for a lot.

Heck Agile hadn't been invented yet back then. You got requirements and got to design the core technology first. There was no such thing as an MVP hack and all of a sudden you had a back end that had millions of lines of code and 10 layers of abstraction that was all built on a bad design.

They are already collector's items? :-/ For quite some time i wanted to buy one to play around with Glide (on a real machine) but i postponed it since it also requires building a full desktop and i do not have space at my current place :-P.

Perhaps i should try and find a couple of those before they disappear.

It wasnt 32bit color that made Nvidia emerge the winner. It was relentless push forward and an army of EEs working around the clock. On all accounts Nvidias first product should of been their last, supporting wrong paradigm, wrong specs, total fail. Yet somehow VCs allowed them a second try. After that it was just a straight dog race.

Riva 128 (April 1997) to TNT (June 15, 1998) took 14 months, TNT2 (March 15, 1999) 8 month, GF256 (October 11, 1999) 7 months, GF2 (April 26, 2000) 6 months, | 3dfx dies here |, GF3 (February 27, 2001) 9 months, GF4 (February 6, 2002) 12 months, FX (March 2003) 13 months, etc ...

Just think about it, 6 months between GPU generations, Nvidia had an army working 24/7 while 3dfx had couple ASIC people, 3dfx was murdered in their sleep.

This brings back the memory. I was working for a tiny company in Taiwan at that time. We had been producing VGA cards for a while at that time. An IC distributor brought us a demo board of Voodoo 3D (V1) card. I ran the demo and told my boss that it was the best 3D graphic that I have ever seen. My boss just decided to run with it. Back in those days, VGA card vendor standard practice was to modify the reference in two way. 1. Modify the layout so it can accommodate many different memory chips. If your board can use cheaper memory chip, you will have better profit ( often mean chip which did meet standard memory testing, but still usable with some effort in layout and hardware design) 2. Modify the driver so you have a better benchmark score.

Since we were a tiny company with not many resources so we decided to just manufacture the reference design. This decision enables us to be the first one in Taiwan to ship the product. I cold call 50 companies in Europe. I did not have much success at first since distributors in Europe were not convinced that 3D card can sell. Internet was slow back then, we were still using dialup modem and sending video capture was not an option. I finally got a break when I called the 42nd company on the list: Guillemot (France). Guillemot got their start in PC gaming sound card so they were already interested in the 3D card. Guillemot was talking to Orchid Technology but they need a lower price than what Orchid can offer. Since all other Taiwanese makers were still evaluating or in the development process, we got the business because our price is US$50 lower than Orchid and able to ship right away.

Indeed. My point of view is fixated on a working-class perspective from the USA. I wouldn't say things here feel like hell, it's just more effort and people aren't used to studying or instilling discipline in their children so they can get up to par. There's no more jobs where you have no advanced education or specific skillset, where you walk in and walk out buying a house, motorcycle and 2 cars. People aren't used to not having that available. I've spent most of my career trying to be skills-based to not fall out of the middle class here. It's no longer easy, and it was felt after 9/11 and definitely after 2008.

I certainly dislike the shift of money out of the US (and western Europe, which is really in the same boat as we are), but tough to wish poverty, dismay or anything of the sort on the rest of the world.

In my career so far, I've worked with many people from Bulgaria, along with India. Really enjoyed the experience to be honest. I'm a best-person-for-the-job sort of guy (a concept that is actually falling by the wayside in the increasingly job-strapped USA in favor of nepotism and cronyism), and don't fret over macro-economic issues that I don't control. Just do my best to survive in the environment I was born in like everyone else.

I wouldn't say everyone is getting a great deal out of the US's economic system eating its own people, plenty of the world is being ignored outright. Eastern Europe and Asia are definitely some hotspots gaining though. I think global scale might be a stretch. But I could be wrong, just thinking about the parts of the world where capitalists aren't investing as much.

I love talking to folks from Bulgaria and such about their lives from the Soviet era till today. One told me that "we didn't have much, but you didn't care or notice because everyone else was". Lack of envy etc, that individual was actually admiring his previous life in ways, which I understand given how miserable so many people appear today..

Very interesting perspectives on life and the world, to me at least. I also enjoy teams with folks from India, usually upbeat and smiling and that's (almost) all I ask for. I also suspect working with developers in Latin America would be a similar experience. The culture differences get a little abrasive though once you move out of India into the rest of Asia.