M2 Makeover

[jimc]

haha yeah, i learned on an apple 2c. it was my first computer. if i remember right it was 128k which was the operating system and you had some left over for the program. the operating system back then was tiny. i wrote some games back then which ran out of room in the memory so had to figure out how to break things up into multiple files then load each section of the game as needed. of course now every piece of software has hundreds or thousands of files but that wasnt all that popular back then especially when writing in basic.

[Jules]

Remember when there were no hard drives and you had to load the operating system off a 5" floppy (the old ones that actually WERE floppy) every time you turned on your computer? If I remember right, the RAM on an Apple II computer was something like 256K, and it had to hold the OS AND your program! Those were the days when programmers had to write lean & mean code where every byte mattered.

Chuckle.....Yes indeed, and we considered those a great improvement! (Back in the dark ages, we used data technicians to key data onto punch cards that were then fed into the machines.) My first, (pre-Windows/pre-Apple), IBM desktop computer was only 64kb. It ran a spreadsheet and word processor off the DOS. Kept that thing for over 10 years....

......then Windows hit. Whoooosh!

And here we are printing physical objects off our laptops, and carrying around cell phones in our pockets that are more powerful than the computers we used to send men to the moon. Amazing to have watched and participated in such rapid technical advances in so brief a time-frame.

[rsilvers]

I just noticed that you can ray-trace an image in a web browser about 450 times faster than back in 1985. That is a big change.

[pyronaught]

I just noticed that you can ray-trace an image in a web browser about 450 times faster than back in 1985. That is a big change.

Yep, I remember ray tracing a simple sphere or tea pot on the Amiga computer back in 1985 and it would take something like 12 hours. At the time Amiga was the state-of-the-art graphics machine for doing that sort of work too, miles ahead of the PC and Windows did not even exist yet. I was actually disappointed to see Microsoft Windows come out the winner in that big race, since they were the LAST of the big companies to even jump on the GUI bandwagon and were a solid 10 years behind Apple and Commodore. Even after the IBM platform won the hardware race, it took Windows years to catch up to what Apple, Atari and Amiga were already doing. If IBM lost the hardware race Microsoft would have only been a minor also-ran in computer history. Had Apple gone with an open architecture and allowed clones they would have beat IBM. That was the key move that made IBM the winner.

[jsc]

This is the page Rob was referring to: https://home.comcast.net/~erniew/cghist/juggler_rt.html

The image at the top of the page is not a JPEG or PNG. It is being ray traced by your browser in JavaScript when you load the page. That image, at that resolution, would take five hours on an Amiga.

[pyronaught]

I was a subscriber to AmigaWorld and actually remember seeing that juggler image. I still have my old Amiga 1000 up in the attic. I had to save my paper route money for an entire year to buy that thing when I was in high school and didn't have the heart to just throw it away like I've done with all my old PCs since that time. When you open the case to one of the original Amiga 1000s, the inside of the cover has the signatures of all the developers who worked on it molded into the plastic. You can tell they took pride in their accomplishment and knew they had created something great.

[rsilvers]

Had Apple gone with an open architecture and allowed clones they would have beat IBM. That was the key move that made IBM the winner.

Apple did beat IBM. Apple is the #1 or #2 most valuable company in the world. I would go so far as to say that "everyone" agrees that OSX is better than Windows and the only thing stopping it from being more widely used is that the Apple-tax makes it expensive.

[rsilvers]

I could never afford an Amiga 1000, but eventually got a 500 but could never afford a hard drive so had floppy-only. One of my college friends spent $10,000 on a NeXT computer when they came out - like when they had the magneto-optical drive only. I guess he wanted it bad. Had a donated Apple-Lisa in high-school and much later I gave Lisa a ride home.

[jimc]

i had to look the amiga up. 1985 i was in 5th grade so schools were just warming the kids up to computers at that point. they never really pushed computers too much until high school where they were all about the apple2 and i think commodore was about done at that point. i think most of you guys have 5-8 years on me.

[rsilvers]

In 6th grade I was writing (not very good) TRS-80 programs. They probably just printed text in a loop.