Hacker News Reader

Comment by AndrewStephens | Hacker News Reader

OK, you are technically (the best kind of) correct. Some people were thinking of scrolling and sprites in 1979 but those people were using expensive dedicated hardware that would take a few years to filter down to home computers once people saw the advantages.

View on HN

It’s easy to forget how far apart the low and and high end used to be. When the 8-bit Apple ][ was the hot home computer, you could buy machines with 32-bit CPUs with megabytes of RAM, virtual memory, and floating point, running a multitasking, multiuser OS. But such a thing cost more than a luxury car, maybe more than a nice house.

Cost was the innovation for those early home computers. They weren’t doing anything remarkable, except for doing it at a price ordinary people could actually afford. If you were willing to spend more (because the computer ran your payroll, or because the computer got people to drop quarters into it all day long) you could get much more capable stuff.

These days you can drop a few hundred bucks and get something that’s not too far off from the best that money can buy. The main difference between a cheap PC and what passes for a “supercomputer” these days is that the supercomputer has much better interconnects and there’s just a lot more of it.

My first computer, purchased in 1978 for about $700, was an 8k Commodore PET. I've just finished building my first new PC in 15 years; a Zen 5 9950X with 96G RAM and a 4TB PCIe-5 SSD for about $2800. That's roughly the same, inflation-adjusted, as that PET!

It's been a real trip watching the accumulation of exponential improvements the past 50 years.

And if you managed to go out and spend a million dollars on a computer instead, it wouldn’t be all that different from what you bought here. The CPUs would be very similar, similar RAM and storage, etc. It would be a lot more powerful, but that mostly comes from scaling horizontally. More RAM, more CPUs, more everything. But it will run the same sort of software and run most of it about as fast, just more of it at once.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_8-bit_computers

Atari 800 Home Computer System was released in 1979 and had both bitmap and character graphics as well as sprites.

The Atari really did have amazing graphics capabilities but the basic Apple][ design predates it by at least 2 years. Apple were slow to add graphical enhancements to the ][ line, perhaps not wanting to be labeled as a mere "gaming" machine.

Atari had the capital to use custom ASICs to provide that functionality. The Apple II was all off-the-shelf parts.

It also supported smooth scrolling.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com