Michael Abrash said something like Woz's quote also. Once you know it /can/ be done it somehow becomes easier. Often the less you know the better you are. Exam

Michael Abrash said something like Woz's quote also. Once you know it /can/ be done it somehow becomes easier. Often the less you know the better you are. Example, in his black book abrash tells a story about working at number nine. Their got word that one of their competitors had put a FIFO buffer on one of their cards (this was the ISA period 386 era). The staff at number nine panicked. They were so close to being finished their design they didn't have the space for a FIFO. So they put a single bit write FIFO in. Then they taped out and went to market, praying they could compete. Then the other card came out on the market.... with an 8byte read FIFO. At the time video memory was /dead/ slow, so everyone designed their programs to never, ever, ever read VGA memory. Instead you wrote to a virtual buffer and flipped it to the screen. The results, number nine absolutely creamed the competition for some time. And people still didn't read VGA memory. Moral: sometimes just knowing it can be done is all you need. and often too much knowledge will send you down the wrong path.