I remember when the C128 came out with Sprites - efficient basic animations. Ah... Those were the days.
On 10/3/07, Nadav Har'El <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wed, Oct 03, 2007, Shachar Shemesh wrote about "Nostalgia is not what it > used to be (was: Petition to ask MainConcept)": > > Which means it all comes down to this. Why? Why do things take more space? > > > > Part of it is understandable. The C64 had a 160x200 with 16 possible > > colors screen, with not all combination of colors possible in each > >... > > But picture sizes aren't everything. Appleworks was a two sided program > > that gave you a word processor, spreadsheet and a database, including OS > > (Apple ProDOS) all in less than 290KB. How? I find it extremely unlikely > > that the entire program was written in Assembly. It was, probably, > > written in C or Pascal, and compiled. > >... > > I think your analysis is right on the money. > There indeed seem to be two issues. The first issue, as you said, is that on > the > C64, there were a lot of things you couldn't do: you couldn't play recorded > music (just synthesised music, which was considered a marvel at the time), > you couldn't play video. Heck, with the lousy resolution and number of colors > you couldn't even display a realistic image (I remember when the Amiga came > out, with its 4096 colors, everyone made a fuss about being able to show a > realistic image). So if now my hard-disk contains (for example) 5 GB of music > and 5 GB of photos, none of this was even possible in the C64 days, so the > space wasn't needed. Let alone video, which is the only thing that could > possibly fill up my new 320 GB disk. > > The second reason is, of course, bloat. On the C64 I had one diskette with > a C compiler, editor, and a simplified Unix-like shell, all in 160 KB on disk > (and only 50 KB of memory to use). Today, on Linux, just bash takes quadruple > that space, and even "ls" comes close to filling such a diskette! > *Everything* got bloated - software got more and more options, code got less > efficient (with people caring less about efficiency), libraries got bigger > too, the executable contains a lot of cruft. The funniest waste of space I > can think of is the "COPYING" file, which my computer has 374 (!) copies of > which installed, totalling 7.7 MB. That's 47 Commodore-64 diskettes... ;-) > > > pixel. I'd say this means that an uncompressed picture took (if I > > understand the graphic encoding correctly) about 9.3KB in full color > > mode, a little less (8.8KB) in sorta color mode (reason being that mode > > While 9 KB might sound a little, actually a lot lot less was used for doing > animation on the C64. There were two issues: First, the tiny memory (around > 50 KB available to the application) and absurdly slow disk drive, even in that > time's standards (300 bytes per second!), didn't allow you to animate more > than 5 of this frames. Second, the CPU was so slow, that just painting one > frame would easily take more than a second (in BASIC, it could take you a > minute...). So the favorite option for animation on the C64 were "sprites". > These were small (12x21 pixel) animations drawn by the video hardware, and > used to move around game characters and the likes. So the game never contained > animations of whole frames, but rather of the tiny sprites that moved around - > and this took very little space. > > > I think a lot of it has to do with "when need must". You only had 128KB > > of RAM, you only had so many floppy sides you could use, you had no > > choice but to make do. Programming was centered around making things > > fit, just as it was about making things spry. > > There's a famous paper on the design of the Unix "spell" program, which > ran (if I remember correctly) on some PDP 10 with 65 KB of memory. Much > of the work involved in fitting all the words in less than that memory. > When I started working on Hspell, it was obvious that nobody really cared > about how much memory it would take. When it ended up taking 100 KB of disk > space and 4 MB of memory, everyone thought it was perfectly acceptable (and > even small if you compare it, for example, to aspell). > > > -- > Nadav Har'El | Wednesday, Oct 3 2007, 21 Tishri 5768 > [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- > Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |Share your knowledge. It's a way to > http://nadav.harel.org.il |achieve immortality. > > ================================================================= > To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with > the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command > echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
