"flipper" wrote in message
...
In short, IBM royally screwed things up. They had no idea what they
had wrought in making a 'PC' (or, rather, in buying an existing design
from a small shop) and, in fact, had no vision of it being what we
think of as a 'PC'. Their original notion was to use the thing as a
'smart terminal' front end to a 'real computer' and the cat was out of
the bag before they even knew there was a cat in the bag.

Smart terminal? Hell, with 640kiB, who even needs a mainframe!

I once wrote a pretty nice graphics engine in BASIC and assembly (all
three... QuickBasic alone, then with ASM modules, then the whole thing in
ASM). The machine code came to about 9kB, and it used 200k of memory
(textures, buffers, etc.). Even with DOS, that's hardly half the memory.
So, even intentionally being wasteful of memory, I haven't hit the ceiling
yet. Processor sure is slow, though ;-) (Modern processors fit the whole
thing in cache, so the 16-bit inner loops run at full speed, giving
~400FPS overall. I got about 5 SPF on the 8086, including a whole second
to naively convert the 8 bit frame buffer to EGA bitplanes.)

That computer's pretty sweet, if not for its relatively momentous
slowness. 256k EGA graphics. True 16 bit 8086. Even used to have a
sound card for it, too bad I lost that thing.

Tim

--
Deep Friar: a very philosophical monk.
Website: http://webpages.charter.net/dawill/tmoranwms