You're saying that video GPUs are bad design because they just compensate for a slow processor?
They are when the ASIC's design becomes the code target, tying you into that backward-compatibility ball and chain. Sure, they're everywhere on the PC, but you talk to them with device drivers through an API in the OS, not hardware registers at specific memory addresses, as many Amiga games did.
It was beating the pants off of x86 until Intel started figuring out dynamic recompilation tricks, AND Motorola stopped caring about the 68K, after the PowerPC thing happened. Of course we know how that turned out, in the end Motorola only wanted to make low-power embedded PPC CPUs with abysmal front-side bus speeds, and IBM only wanted to make minicomputer CPUs that needed liquid cooling.
It didn't have the VGA style chunky pixel mode that you needed to play Doom - and that kinda didn't help either.
That's something that rarely gets mentioned in retrospectives on the Amiga. AIUI, it only used a planar mode for graphics. While that's nice for only using the bits you need, it has a big disadvantage when you don't have special hardware (a blitter or a special write mode) to deal with it. Each plane requires memory accesses in multiple blocks of memory, so if you are strictly using linear memory accesses, there is a time when the pixel isn't completely updated and can momentarily display an artifact on the display. IIRC, video cards on the PC which use a planar mode avoid this by having hardware to write all planes at the same time with a mask. Chunky modes ensure that each pixel is written in a single memory access, and are less fiddly to deal with in general.
A unified software API for graphics? Definitely not Amiga, as everybody programmed their Amiga games to the bare metal, and would have been out of luck with a different graphics chipset! Or are you saying that Amiga showed the need for it?
No consumer operating systems had adequate memory protection at that time. MacOS didn't have any until OS X.
FTFY. 7.0 is when it started using the MMU, but just to give you a bigger memory space. There was no protection unless you ran A/UX, and then only on the Unix side.
That's nonsense. The PC had originally intended to use a 68K but changed to Intel due to problems with production commitment.
The story as I've pieced it together over the years seems to be that IBM was considering the 68K, but specifically the 68008, for the same reason they wanted the 8088 rather than the 8086, being cheaper to use in an era when commodity DRAMs were all 1-bit wide. They wanted Motorola to commit to their chip being ready by a specific date. Motorola did not want to commit to that date. IBM went with the (ugh) 8088. Motorola did actually manage to get their chip ready by the date IBM wanted, but as IBM had already made their decision, it didn't matter.
In my opinion, all the crap involved in dealing with 8086 segment addressing and the original 1 megabyte address space, as well as the 80286 protected mode being entirely unusable for MS-DOS (and still using 16-bit addressing), probably set the PC industry back by ten years.
At some point, Apple came out with an accelerated video card using an AM29000 CPU, the 8-24 GC. This was a Good Thing, and made your graphics faster. Then the 68040 came out. Not only was the 68040 faster at graphics than the 8-24 GC, but its cache was incompatible, so acceleration was disabled at startup, and you had an 8-24 graphics card with a useless CPU on it. (Cache inconsistency in video memory is very obvious!) And that was with a good API that was designed with future hardware in mind.
The problem with the Amiga hardware was that while it was very powerful, there was no good way to make better hardware that could work with old code (games loved to bypass the UI and talk to the chips directly!), without literally baking the old graphics hardware into new chips as a compatibility mode.
In contrast, taking over the hardware was actively discouraged by Apple. Doing funny shit with the floppy disk controller for copy protection was barely tolerated. Directly writing to the screen at the original address was never supported in later hardware. When the Mac II came out, it could use multiple monitors and multiple resolutions. But there was still a game or two that would check the baseAddr and rowBytes and dump a raw B&W bitmap to the screen in a color mode.
The IIgs literally should have been the Mac LC with either a 6502 and II-on-a-chip, or a 6502 emulator that worked like the 68000 emulator in PPC Macs. Apple back then cared way too much about their margins (as a Mac guy, I was shocked at Apple II prices), and tried too hard to keep the riff-raff away from the Mac.
Where is SGI? Where is Apollo? Where is HP? Where is Alpha?
SGI got killed by cheap 3D graphics cards on PCs. Everyone else got killed by Windows NT and Linux. Alpha and Itanic both got killed by Microsoft wanting x64.
It used a 68008, the bastard child of the 68000 series with an 8-bit bus. They were the only consumer computer to use it. (The rumors about IBM talking with Motorola when making the PC were likely them considering the 68008, but Motorola was still in their "we'd rather sell 10,000 units for high-end Unix servers than 10,000,000 units for cheap computers, why don't you try our 68HC11?" period.)
A reason that the Mac architecture won out long-term is that while the Amiga's graphics hardware was technically way ahead of everybody else, almost everything that used it depended on the specifics of that design with that particular combination of features. (Who else used HAM colors? Even if they didn't realize it, Amiga was basically committing to putting that in every future design!)
By the early '90s, the first graphics accelerators had appeared for Mac, and they worked by intercepting the existing API (one of the best things the Mac OS designers did was leave hooks for everything--they were constantly designing with the future in mind) to make "normal" graphics run faster. Sure, they couldn't make bit planes fly around with color table animation (literally all that the "bouncing ball" demo did), but they could move pixels around in a single bit plane a lot faster than the main CPU, and freed up the main CPU to do other things with those cycles.
Then 3D graphics cards happened, and the new OS X graphics were designed to work with graphics cards that could do compositing from multiple bit planes. Windows did something similar. (Aero?) So by the early 2Ks, there was literally nothing left of the Amiga technology that wasn't already mainstream, but with an API that didn't require you to know the details of how the whiz-bang hardware worked.
HD floppy disks (both sizes) were recorded essentially the same as an 8" double density floppy. So a 3.5" floppy disk needed over twice the linear density and track density. They were barely larger than the hole in the middle of an 8" floppy.
My only problem with 3.5" disks was in the '90s when the good manufacturers had left the market, and the cheap HD floppies you could get in a 25-pack at the office store were badly made and unreliable. I know they were unreliable because I was trying to install Slackware from floppy disk back then. I would get the images via FTP, and copy them to floppy, CD-R recording still being a bit too expensive for me then. It seemed like I had as much as a 50% fail rate of hitting some kind of disk error somewhere on every disk!
I never had a problem with double density except for one box of Verbatims I got in 85 or so when other brands cost $5 a disk. It was literally the third or fourth box of 3.5" disks I ever bought. I didn't have much experience with HD 5.25", but I don't remember them being the utmost in reliability either.
I left two years ago and went back to San Antonio, but due to family reasons. I sold a house in that area back in May 2016 for twice (gross) what I paid for it 15 years earlier. It wasn't quite as far as 620, but it was far enough out that I might even get Google Fiber sooner that I would have if I had stayed in Austin. And traffic? Hell yeah, that area only has 183 and Parmer to get you through, squeezed between hills to the southwest, and the undeveloped Robertson Ranch to the northeast. Have they started rebuilding that last horrible mile of Anderson Mill at 183 yet? The main thing that I miss is being 10 minutes away from Fry's; now I have to wait until I'm going up for something else.
Nah, peak whale oil was the 19th century. It was cheap tallow candles that were the problem back in the Renaissance, because they smoked like crazy. Imagine trying to read a book at night with the smoke from a tallow candle getting in your eyes! Wax candles were the good stuff.
A VR headset needs to be no bulkier than a pair of sunglasses with earbuds attached
It is also going to have to accommodate people who wear prescription glasses, both nearsighted and farsighted. I think you'll find that the people who are the most rah-rah about VR do not wear glasses.
The Linux x32 ABI as a reminder requires x86_64 processors and is engineered to support the modern x86_64 features but with using 32-bit pointers rather than 64-bit pointers. The x32 ABI allows for making use of the additional registers and other features of x86_64 but with just 32-bit pointers in order to provide faster performance when 64-bit pointers are unnecessary.
...except for the fact that this explanation is 25% of the four-paragraph article, and another 25% of it was already in TFS. Oops.
MPEG-4 only uses the low-level QT container format. But it uses the "atoms", or whatever they're called, differently. That's like saying TIFF and AIFF files are compatible because they use the same low-level IFF file format. Even TIFF files aren't compatible with each other, as they can contain arbitrary graphics formats such as T-4 Fax.
Back in OS X 10.4, Apple came out with the Dashboard, which let you create applets that were written in HTML/CSS/JS. Except they didn't require you to bundle an entire fucking web browser and support library into each one. But they did that mostly by making it use the WebKit library to become the web browser, which came from KHTML. Since it's a system-common web browser, only one copy needs to be shared among the entire system. I wrote one once, and I liked the DHTML in a single web page model of programming, but had no time to dedicate to doing more.
On the other hand, it uses something like the Windows 8 mobile style applets, where you go into a special screen mode to run them, rather than letting them behave like regular apps. This sort of worked okay with its intended use as a new kind of desk accessories, but didn't go all the way to making something that behaved like a fully independent app. If it is possible, I'm not familiar with anything built that way. And of course it would surely be a Mac-only thing, because Apple so often gets a bit ahead of the rest of the world sometimes, comes up with its own way of doing something, then the rest of the world does it differently, orphaning Apple's earlier work.
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You're saying that video GPUs are bad design because they just compensate for a slow processor?
They are when the ASIC's design becomes the code target, tying you into that backward-compatibility ball and chain. Sure, they're everywhere on the PC, but you talk to them with device drivers through an API in the OS, not hardware registers at specific memory addresses, as many Amiga games did.
It was beating the pants off of x86 until Intel started figuring out dynamic recompilation tricks, AND Motorola stopped caring about the 68K, after the PowerPC thing happened. Of course we know how that turned out, in the end Motorola only wanted to make low-power embedded PPC CPUs with abysmal front-side bus speeds, and IBM only wanted to make minicomputer CPUs that needed liquid cooling.
It didn't have the VGA style chunky pixel mode that you needed to play Doom - and that kinda didn't help either.
That's something that rarely gets mentioned in retrospectives on the Amiga. AIUI, it only used a planar mode for graphics. While that's nice for only using the bits you need, it has a big disadvantage when you don't have special hardware (a blitter or a special write mode) to deal with it. Each plane requires memory accesses in multiple blocks of memory, so if you are strictly using linear memory accesses, there is a time when the pixel isn't completely updated and can momentarily display an artifact on the display. IIRC, video cards on the PC which use a planar mode avoid this by having hardware to write all planes at the same time with a mask. Chunky modes ensure that each pixel is written in a single memory access, and are less fiddly to deal with in general.
DirectX for once is one of those heritages.
A unified software API for graphics? Definitely not Amiga, as everybody programmed their Amiga games to the bare metal, and would have been out of luck with a different graphics chipset! Or are you saying that Amiga showed the need for it?
That wasn't because the Amiga was superior, that was because the PC clone architecture was so inherently awful.
No consumer operating systems had adequate memory protection at that time. MacOS didn't have any until OS X.
FTFY. 7.0 is when it started using the MMU, but just to give you a bigger memory space. There was no protection unless you ran A/UX, and then only on the Unix side.
That's nonsense. The PC had originally intended to use a 68K but changed to Intel due to problems with production commitment.
The story as I've pieced it together over the years seems to be that IBM was considering the 68K, but specifically the 68008, for the same reason they wanted the 8088 rather than the 8086, being cheaper to use in an era when commodity DRAMs were all 1-bit wide. They wanted Motorola to commit to their chip being ready by a specific date. Motorola did not want to commit to that date. IBM went with the (ugh) 8088. Motorola did actually manage to get their chip ready by the date IBM wanted, but as IBM had already made their decision, it didn't matter.
In my opinion, all the crap involved in dealing with 8086 segment addressing and the original 1 megabyte address space, as well as the 80286 protected mode being entirely unusable for MS-DOS (and still using 16-bit addressing), probably set the PC industry back by ten years.
At some point, Apple came out with an accelerated video card using an AM29000 CPU, the 8-24 GC. This was a Good Thing, and made your graphics faster. Then the 68040 came out. Not only was the 68040 faster at graphics than the 8-24 GC, but its cache was incompatible, so acceleration was disabled at startup, and you had an 8-24 graphics card with a useless CPU on it. (Cache inconsistency in video memory is very obvious!) And that was with a good API that was designed with future hardware in mind.
The problem with the Amiga hardware was that while it was very powerful, there was no good way to make better hardware that could work with old code (games loved to bypass the UI and talk to the chips directly!), without literally baking the old graphics hardware into new chips as a compatibility mode.
In contrast, taking over the hardware was actively discouraged by Apple. Doing funny shit with the floppy disk controller for copy protection was barely tolerated. Directly writing to the screen at the original address was never supported in later hardware. When the Mac II came out, it could use multiple monitors and multiple resolutions. But there was still a game or two that would check the baseAddr and rowBytes and dump a raw B&W bitmap to the screen in a color mode.
The IIgs literally should have been the Mac LC with either a 6502 and II-on-a-chip, or a 6502 emulator that worked like the 68000 emulator in PPC Macs. Apple back then cared way too much about their margins (as a Mac guy, I was shocked at Apple II prices), and tried too hard to keep the riff-raff away from the Mac.
Where is SGI? Where is Apollo? Where is HP? Where is Alpha?
SGI got killed by cheap 3D graphics cards on PCs. Everyone else got killed by Windows NT and Linux. Alpha and Itanic both got killed by Microsoft wanting x64.
It used a 68008, the bastard child of the 68000 series with an 8-bit bus. They were the only consumer computer to use it. (The rumors about IBM talking with Motorola when making the PC were likely them considering the 68008, but Motorola was still in their "we'd rather sell 10,000 units for high-end Unix servers than 10,000,000 units for cheap computers, why don't you try our 68HC11?" period.)
A reason that the Mac architecture won out long-term is that while the Amiga's graphics hardware was technically way ahead of everybody else, almost everything that used it depended on the specifics of that design with that particular combination of features. (Who else used HAM colors? Even if they didn't realize it, Amiga was basically committing to putting that in every future design!)
By the early '90s, the first graphics accelerators had appeared for Mac, and they worked by intercepting the existing API (one of the best things the Mac OS designers did was leave hooks for everything--they were constantly designing with the future in mind) to make "normal" graphics run faster. Sure, they couldn't make bit planes fly around with color table animation (literally all that the "bouncing ball" demo did), but they could move pixels around in a single bit plane a lot faster than the main CPU, and freed up the main CPU to do other things with those cycles.
Then 3D graphics cards happened, and the new OS X graphics were designed to work with graphics cards that could do compositing from multiple bit planes. Windows did something similar. (Aero?) So by the early 2Ks, there was literally nothing left of the Amiga technology that wasn't already mainstream, but with an API that didn't require you to know the details of how the whiz-bang hardware worked.
HD floppy disks (both sizes) were recorded essentially the same as an 8" double density floppy. So a 3.5" floppy disk needed over twice the linear density and track density. They were barely larger than the hole in the middle of an 8" floppy.
My only problem with 3.5" disks was in the '90s when the good manufacturers had left the market, and the cheap HD floppies you could get in a 25-pack at the office store were badly made and unreliable. I know they were unreliable because I was trying to install Slackware from floppy disk back then. I would get the images via FTP, and copy them to floppy, CD-R recording still being a bit too expensive for me then. It seemed like I had as much as a 50% fail rate of hitting some kind of disk error somewhere on every disk!
I never had a problem with double density except for one box of Verbatims I got in 85 or so when other brands cost $5 a disk. It was literally the third or fourth box of 3.5" disks I ever bought. I didn't have much experience with HD 5.25", but I don't remember them being the utmost in reliability either.
I left two years ago and went back to San Antonio, but due to family reasons. I sold a house in that area back in May 2016 for twice (gross) what I paid for it 15 years earlier. It wasn't quite as far as 620, but it was far enough out that I might even get Google Fiber sooner that I would have if I had stayed in Austin. And traffic? Hell yeah, that area only has 183 and Parmer to get you through, squeezed between hills to the southwest, and the undeveloped Robertson Ranch to the northeast. Have they started rebuilding that last horrible mile of Anderson Mill at 183 yet? The main thing that I miss is being 10 minutes away from Fry's; now I have to wait until I'm going up for something else.
Austin is the containment zone for the caravans of California liberals who flood in.
Nah, peak whale oil was the 19th century. It was cheap tallow candles that were the problem back in the Renaissance, because they smoked like crazy. Imagine trying to read a book at night with the smoke from a tallow candle getting in your eyes! Wax candles were the good stuff.
A VR headset needs to be no bulkier than a pair of sunglasses with earbuds attached
It is also going to have to accommodate people who wear prescription glasses, both nearsighted and farsighted. I think you'll find that the people who are the most rah-rah about VR do not wear glasses.
This is 2018, they would use gigapythons instead.
Would it have hurt to include this?
The Linux x32 ABI as a reminder requires x86_64 processors and is engineered to support the modern x86_64 features but with using 32-bit pointers rather than 64-bit pointers. The x32 ABI allows for making use of the additional registers and other features of x86_64 but with just 32-bit pointers in order to provide faster performance when 64-bit pointers are unnecessary.
...except for the fact that this explanation is 25% of the four-paragraph article, and another 25% of it was already in TFS. Oops.
MPEG-4 only uses the low-level QT container format. But it uses the "atoms", or whatever they're called, differently. That's like saying TIFF and AIFF files are compatible because they use the same low-level IFF file format. Even TIFF files aren't compatible with each other, as they can contain arbitrary graphics formats such as T-4 Fax.
Do something about their in-store food prices and you might get their attention!
Back in OS X 10.4, Apple came out with the Dashboard, which let you create applets that were written in HTML/CSS/JS. Except they didn't require you to bundle an entire fucking web browser and support library into each one. But they did that mostly by making it use the WebKit library to become the web browser, which came from KHTML. Since it's a system-common web browser, only one copy needs to be shared among the entire system. I wrote one once, and I liked the DHTML in a single web page model of programming, but had no time to dedicate to doing more.
On the other hand, it uses something like the Windows 8 mobile style applets, where you go into a special screen mode to run them, rather than letting them behave like regular apps. This sort of worked okay with its intended use as a new kind of desk accessories, but didn't go all the way to making something that behaved like a fully independent app. If it is possible, I'm not familiar with anything built that way. And of course it would surely be a Mac-only thing, because Apple so often gets a bit ahead of the rest of the world sometimes, comes up with its own way of doing something, then the rest of the world does it differently, orphaning Apple's earlier work.
You only have to run faster than the... no wait, that won't work.