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Strongly disagree. There is a big difference between doing some interesting hacking at a young age and getting your GPU driver included in the mainline Linux ke

by shawnz 6y ago

Strongly disagree. There is a big difference between doing some interesting hacking at a young age and getting your GPU driver included in the mainline Linux kernel. The author appears to be a true CS prodigy.

pjmlp 6y ago
In 8 and 16 bit home computers you wrote your own graphics driver, in Assembly, if you wanted to draw anything beyond the toy BASIC graphics commands. I guess anyone doing games were a prodigy back then.
- shawnz 6y ago
  Yes, perhaps, and at that time it was also a much simpler proposition to do that. I would imagine at that time there were also many fewer kids at a high-school level doing that kind of hacking, so it might not be totally wrong to say they were all prodigies.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    I guess, C64, Amiga, Atari didn't had programmable graphics hardware after all.
    - spacedcowboy 6y ago
      The Atari did, at least in the technical sense, though not in the sense you mean it. The Ataris had a display process called Antic that you supplied with a display-list, a set of tokens that defined which antic-mode was next as the electron-dot proceeded down the screen. Antic would halt the CPU and take over the bus in order to transfer data from main memory to use for display purposes, be it character or bitmap data You could choose from a variety of modes (15 in all, IIRC) and add horizontal or vertical smooth scrolling to each mode-line individually by toggling a bit in the display-list entry. One further bit allowed you to set a DLI (Display-list interrupt) where the CPU would be interrupted and run your code at that end of the specific display-line on-screen - you had the flyback interval to effect something (not a lot, but you could change colour registers, character-sets, do a few register operations, basically). So it was minimally programmable, and certainly not comparable to today's stuff - but it was groundbreaking in its day.
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        Yep, now imagine a 12 year old kid going at it in 68000 Assembly, and showing their demos to other kinds in the gang.
    - bonzini 6y ago
      Amiga to some extent did, you could upload programs to the Copper.
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        I know that was being sarcastic, following the same tone of previous answers. :)

by shawnz 6y ago

pjmlp 6y ago

In 8 and 16 bit home computers you wrote your own graphics driver, in Assembly, if you wanted to draw anything beyond the toy BASIC graphics commands. I guess anyone doing games were a prodigy back then.

shawnz 6y ago
Yes, perhaps, and at that time it was also a much simpler proposition to do that. I would imagine at that time there were also many fewer kids at a high-school level doing that kind of hacking, so it might not be totally wrong to say they were all prodigies.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  I guess, C64, Amiga, Atari didn't had programmable graphics hardware after all.
  - spacedcowboy 6y ago
    The Atari did, at least in the technical sense, though not in the sense you mean it. The Ataris had a display process called Antic that you supplied with a display-list, a set of tokens that defined which antic-mode was next as the electron-dot proceeded down the screen. Antic would halt the CPU and take over the bus in order to transfer data from main memory to use for display purposes, be it character or bitmap data You could choose from a variety of modes (15 in all, IIRC) and add horizontal or vertical smooth scrolling to each mode-line individually by toggling a bit in the display-list entry. One further bit allowed you to set a DLI (Display-list interrupt) where the CPU would be interrupted and run your code at that end of the specific display-line on-screen - you had the flyback interval to effect something (not a lot, but you could change colour registers, character-sets, do a few register operations, basically). So it was minimally programmable, and certainly not comparable to today's stuff - but it was groundbreaking in its day.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Yep, now imagine a 12 year old kid going at it in 68000 Assembly, and showing their demos to other kinds in the gang.
  - bonzini 6y ago
    Amiga to some extent did, you could upload programs to the Copper.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      I know that was being sarcastic, following the same tone of previous answers. :)