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Comment by MawNicker | Hacker News Reader

Meh. Sort of. He mostly sounds like someone with experience on both platforms who is surprised by the dominance of the one that he considers inferior. His prominence as a developer isn't relevant. I trust that his ability is sufficient and that his experience with the platforms is actual. He is a suitable person to comment on the contrast between them.

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Many people did dump on the PC as inferior, but it was a marvelous platform for tinkerers of every sort, and tinker they did. The result was a firehose of applications and hardware add-ons of every sort imaginable, including some unimaginably good ones like Doom.

Programmers were utterly amazed by Doom. Nobody had thought that was possible on the PC hardware.

The first PC Flight Simulator was another astonishing piece of engineering.

>The result was a firehose of applications and hardware add-ons of every sort imaginable, including some unimaginably good ones like Doom.

Huh?

Doom was developed on NeXT workstations, under the NEXTSTEP operating system. The Doom game engine was programmed in C, and the editing tools were written in Objective-C. The engine was first compiled with Intel's C compiler for DOS, but later Watcom's C/C++ compiler was used. (Wikipedia)

People were amazed at it running on the PC, and running very well.

BTW, I would also build the software on a better machine that had memory protection, get it all working correctly, then port it to DOS. That would greatly cut down on the debugging time.

Yes, but the appeareance of Doom on PC is not because PC was a "tinkerer's platform" as the argument in the parent post goes.

The tinkering part leading to the creation of Doom was done on NeXT.

Doom ran under a 32 bit DOS extender, which was created by tinkerers, not Microsoft.

"Microsoft" Flight Simulator on the PC was actually a version of Sublogic's Flight Simulator for the Apple ][ (although it gets complicated because the classic setting of Chicago's Meigs Field was on the PC first and then backported to the Apple ][ version). But if you were impressed that the flight simulator ran on a 4.77 Mhz PC, how much more amazing that it ran on a 1 Mhz Apple ][?

> The first PC Flight Simulator was another astonishing piece of engineering.

True. I remember the feedback a WW2 vet pilot gave after testing PC FS. It went something like 'if flying on a PC got any more realistic, you'd need a pilot's license to do it.' !!

I agree, and I think that is a common problem with purely technical people. They don't include all of the other important factors: affordability, support (by the company and number of people around you familiar with the system), and many others.

The Amiga sound and graphics chips blew other systems out of the water technically, and did good with the consumer offerings like the A500, but aside from a niche in the video editing market (Toaster on A1000/A2000), Macs and PCs swamped it in sales numbers.

I have had a lot of systems starting in 1978 with an all-in-one CPM PET with a cassette drive to load programs, a very small green text terminal, and 8K RAM. I paid $800 for it used, and another $850 for a 32K Ram upgrade the year after. You could 'pop the hood' like an old American muscle car, and check the board inside, and install the RAM card. I wrote a horse racing game in 1979 using just ASCII characters with random trots, and an odds and bettings system for my two horse-loving, OTB-visting parents.

I have only really lusted after three machines: A Lisp Machine, Silicon Graphics workstation, and the NeXT machine, again all technically brilliant, but not the biggest sellers. Pricey because of that.

The best tech doesn't always win by default, and that's not always a bad thing (as I once thought).

Funny memory. We bought an SGI machine for when clients were around (doing 3D graphics and video compositing). In the backroom we did it all on Amigas and Lightwave. Clients thought it was all done on SGI/Softimage - so it must be good! It would've been (better) if we could afford as much workstations and application seats as we would've wanted. I still have two SGI's that work. It feels like owning a vintage Ferrari or something, even though nowhere near the monetary value.

Where was this? I worked in NYC, and I landed a non-paying, non-intern learning position at a 3D animation company using SGI with Prisms, which is now Houdini. I loved the design, and Irix was great! I recall thinking that the screens were so hi-res ;)

It was in Croatia, Europe. Same story all over the world though (at least where I was at). And, they were so "high-res". At the time, I believe only screen I saw on a workstation that had such a high resolution was on one HP-UX machine. They were also a great sight. Shame about later models (Octane) being such loud beasts though. Not really for desks.

Yeah, I would not be able to read the print on my SGI today without my reading glasses! Prisms had some many little windows and parameters. The CHOPs(?), procedural animation stuff, a terminal, etc...

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