Hacker News Reader

Comment by _benj | Hacker News Reader

This is more along the lines of my “vintage”.

Thanks kind of feel left out when folk here start remembering their c64 and Ataris and whatnot!

My first computer was a celeron 500MHz with windows 98 (maybe there was a 300MHz with win 3.1 but I never got it working)

So, this blog is nostalgia! Winamp and the Linux clone!? DDR2!? Back in my day we had some other thing that I don’t remember the name (sdram?), we ruled the city because with winrar we could use the T1 of the university to download stuff, then split it in 4 3.5” 1.44Mb floppy disks to install on our computers!

Oh, and CD-R changed the game forever! And usb… it took a while and a few dongles (parallel to usd, serial to usb, ps2 to usb) and hunting down the proper .inf file, but it was glorious!

That’s my kind of nostalgia :)

View on HN

>So, this blog is nostalgia! Winamp and the Linux clone!?

XMMS: http://www.xmms.org/

That one!

I got my first computer in the days of CD-ROM and was amazed that a CD could hold more data than my Win95 (later Red Hat 6 (not RHEL)) Pentium Packard Bell's 512MB HDD could.

"Thanks kind of feel left out when folk here start remembering their c64 and Ataris and whatnot! My first computer was a celeron 500MHz..."

In a lot of ways, between the c64 and the celeron 500MHz is an enormous, almost unrecognizable leap, whereas between the celeron 500MHz and the machine in my hand is just a lot of incremental change. I had a machine ~2000 that was de facto a 500MHz Duron (running at its full 1GHz overheated very quickly), and I used the same basic paradigm on that as I'm using now. Emacs, browser, terminal windows, MP3 player. Wifi needed a dongle. The integrated webcam is new since then.

>I used the same basic paradigm on that as I'm using now. Emacs, browser, terminal windows, MP3 player.

I don't disagree with your overall point, but two parts of that paradigm, Emacs and the terminal emulator, do date back to the C64 era. Here's Richard Stallman on developing GNU Emacs: "There were people in those days, in 1985, who had one-megabyte machines without virtual memory. They wanted to be able to use GNU Emacs. This meant I had to keep the program as small as possible." [0] Emacs may never have run on Commodore computers, but my impression is that it ran on very similar computers.

[0]: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html

My first computer connected to internet was the family Pentium 100Mhz with 64MB of ram that ended up retired by my father for a much powerful athlon whatever. It used to run Windows 98. I inherited that one and immediately ditched the Windows 98 as it couldn't allow me to listen to music while browsing and use an office apps, audio was stuttering all the time.

This is actually the reason I started using linux. I remember internet was usable at 100Mhz back in the days, I could play some videos (obviously at a much lower res, I was using a CRT). The funny things is some of the apps mentionned here already existed at the time so it resonnate with my experience, although back in the days I tended to prefer apps running on terminals unless it was absolutely necessary. Emails, music player, I was a terminal for all of that. My computing life was not that different than today bar the videos resolution increase. And the web wasn't less interesting or usable.

It is incredible how crap internet has become that we can't reasonnably think we can browse it comfortably on what would have looked like a supercomputer at the time of my 100Mhz Pentium.

MOS Technology 6510 @ 1.023Mhz here!

I cannot fathom…

My closes reference is a PIC16F that I used to program in 8bit assembly, but the thing was 8MHz, and I only blinked an LED! :)

Closer than you think since IIRC the PIC, like the Z80, takes 4+ clock cycles to complete one instruction and the 6502 can sometimes do it in 1 (albeit a much simpler/limited core, but obviously Commodore/Apple/Nintendo et al made it work).

They made it work by not doing picture rendering on the CPU. Same as GPUs today. Still impressive though

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTRkZ-SKs5g

That's basically the CPU running at 1.024 Mhz. The video hardware is dumb, runs independent of the CPU, and just scans a region of memory to send pixels to the display. All software pushing pixels otherwise.

You are not wrong with the NES, C64 and other machines using a graphics chip with sprites and other hardware features to assist in various ways. But, quite a lot happened on the CPU.

BTW, this game is done on a 1Mhz 6809, all software pushing pixels.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAKxa5C9jHY

(I would skip out to the middle somewhere in that video to get a sense of what is being done)

On that game specifically, it's a single frame buffer. Screen divided into two halves, each drawn while the display is delivering the other to the player.

The Fujitsu FM-7 line of 8-bit computers actually shipped with two 6809 compatible CPUs (Hitachi 6309 IIRC) and the second one just did software graphics the whole time pretending really hard to be a GPU.

Dual 6309 chips? NICE!!

I won't bother, because I've got a good retro hobby going and under control, but I want one of those. :D

Reply on news.ycombinator.com