The Myth of Loss: Bitboys | Hacker News Reader

The Myth of Loss: Bitboys

hardforum.com

62 pointsdavikr19 comments

Very weird take to call Future Crew a "research group" and Second Reality a "graphics technology". Future Crew was a PC Demo group (in Demo Scene) and Second Reality an excellent and ground breaking demo. There wasn't any magic technology in it, but instead some very clever effects from the members, bound together into an artistic demo.

I cannot comment anything about the facts what came after with Bitboys, but the author doesn't seem to know the history and details on their demo scene origins.

I come to write this comment.

Only I don't think "Second Reality" is very artistic. It is very impressive technically, but, to be honest, now you could see that it is quilt made from technical demos from different people. Yes, all these sub-demos are technical masterpieces, but demo as whole doesn't have some story or narrative to tell.

I've re-watched it (youtube rendering) now and, to be honest, these 10 minutes is not entertaining, till you remember on which hardware and in how much codesize it was squeezed.

Embossed nuts? Jumping platonic solids? Yes, very impressive for person who tried to program graphics on PC in 1993 and fantastic technical achievement, but artistic? I cannot say so, sorry.

It's amazing how many 3D start-ups spun out of the Finish demo scene Future Crew: Bitboys, Remedy Entertainment, 3DMark, and I'm pretty sure others that I'm missing. Anyone know why Finland is such an innovative 3D/software powerhouse?

In my opinion as someone who grew up inside it, the factors that created this fertile ground in Finland for young computer hackers in the 1980s and '90s were:

- High-quality educational system, but without pressures to perform (unlike e.g. many Asian countries). There are no standard exams in Finnish schools except a single national one at the end of high school. Teachers all have a master's degree, it's usually a lifelong career, and they have (had?) lots of latitude to create their own curriculums.

- An economic boom in 1984-89 that enabled many households to acquire home computers.

- Long and dark winters that left kids with plenty of time. Combined with the aforementioned educational system, you had teenagers who were already pretty good at math and English playing around with computers on ample free time.

Demoscene. Assembly demo party. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_(demoparty)

Each of the companies you name and more had core people who learned their skills writing demos to Commodore 64, Atari or PC.

Sweden also is strong in similar areas due to that same effect, so the cause should apply to both.

I'd say a big effect is lack of respect for authority figures, people speak up when they see something wrong with no regards to status or authority, and managers tend to accept that. This makes experienced people learn from juniors much better than in many other cultures, which is great to explore new fields. So the game cracking scene that was a big part of the demo scene is just an expression of that strong anti authoritarian culture.

In Japan you have to respect your leader, and in USA you have to be an optimist and not criticize your manager, so their cultures doesn't really get the same effect. It is so much easier when you can just straight out say that someone's demo was bad at something and could probably be made better, and they just listen and improve without you having to be an authority figure.

The demoscene was an interesting social phenomenon where "street credit" from the graffiti scene was applied to math dorks. This created a competitive atmosphere that made you stay up late, reading CGPP, PC Intern, and Ferraro.

I think a few factors/explanations, based on what I remember from colleagues on EFNet...

- Teachers/professors have a more actualized social selection/prestige; the pay is better (especially comparing to a similar US university) so there is more incentive for talented people to stay in education vs go into private sector.

- Finland has a high level of government programs to help industries in various ways. As an example from another industry, Children of Bodom recorded many of their albums in a government owned/sponsored recording studio.

- Finland also has free education. I'm betting a lot of people saw the possibilities, it was likely a bit easier to break into back then.

That said, If you look at the late 80s and early 90s, Finland was a sleeping tech giant. IRC, Linux, InnoDB, Symbian (love it or hate it) all are products from that era...

I remember the PC Gamer issue featuring the tech. You had all those old wild western town screen shots showing things like HDR lighting before HDR was a thing (or felt like it). I also remember E-DRAM (on-die embedded DRAM) that promised insane texture filling speeds. It was exciting at the time as 3D was really blowing up and realism was edging closer and closer. Though noting ever came of it, I always remembered the name Bitboys. I never knew actual hardware existed either.

I was in uni at the time and a professors son went to work for ATI working on graphics chips and I thought it must have been a dream job but the professor countered: "He says it's a boring job dragging libraries of gates into designs, verifying, debugging, and moving on" The following year I heard the son jumped ship to a gaming company doing engine work and loved it.

Hardware existed.

Around 2006 I had some automotive entertainment system from NEC on my table which had one of the Bitboys GPU chips on it. Wrote some vector graphics API for it.

It wasn't bad honestly. It supported OpenGL/ES 1.0 I only had to contact them twice for driver bugs. They resolved that within a few days.

Presumably this post is a follow-on to this one from the weekend: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40315990

Biboys sold for near $50 million to ATI, then it was sold to Qualcomm.

This is how most semiconductor startups work. Do better and show innovation that is bought buy bigger players.

The problem with hardware business is that it’s capital intensive: large, expensive product runs needed. Not many are happy to upfront the bill for a new, unproven, company. Whileas in software business, the upfront cost is fractions, and thus VCs love it more.

Thus, in hardware, funding comes from the existing players who already know the hardware business with its cyclic business and other associated risks.

This 100%.

One (A SINGLE) photolithography machine is like $4B.

There’s no way for a new player to enter the CPU market

You wouldn't normally be physically manufacturing CPUs yourself.

Most likely you'd be supplying an "IP core", which is basically just software. More niche than that, if you actually wanted to supply physical chips, you would contract out the manufacturing to TSMC for example.

This is why most "semiconductor" companies are actually fabless, focusing on design while working with a partner(like TSMC) to have their designs manufactured.

I remember hanging out with Carl Amdahl after we were pitched our nth fabless semiconductor company, and him making the joke that if he ever started another company making IC designs, this time he would call it Fabulous Semiconductor.

And even fabbed semiconductor companies de-fab themselves, like AMD.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlobalFoundries

I don't think it's a problem with how much capital hardware requires. Biotech startups require an order of magnitude more capital with tons more risk with regulatory approval yet the biotech VC industry is huge - the amount invested annually frequently exceeds all of tech VC. Most of the startups that go public do so with zero revenue, let alone profit, and everyone is perfectly fine to bankroll them through clinical trials even though they're all or nothing.

I think there's two problems with hardware: first the marginal profit per unit doesn't scale so to make more profit you have to sell more widgets. The same is mostly true for biotech but the profit margins on a drug are usually >95%, with a much higher ceiling, and are heavily recurring, often for the life of a patient. Since biotech customers are mostly insurance companies, the value of a drug is easy to calculate based on its quality of life improvements and past deals.

Second, success is very all or nothing for hardware companies. Each hardware startup will have a limited number of possible acquirers who specialize in their field so they either become profitable and go public or fail. On the other hand, failed tech companies get acquihired by the tech giants and pharmaceutical companies acquire tons of companies before they even finish clinical trials. Any startup that makes it past phase 3 trials has a 99% chance of getting acquired by a pharmaceutical company so the economics of investing are very enticing, despite the massive capital outlays.

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