Let me tell you another story about fill in Excel ..... many years ago when the Mac was getting its very first graphics cards I worked for 3rd party hardware m

Let me tell you another story about fill in Excel ..... many years ago when the Mac was getting its very first graphics cards I worked for 3rd party hardware manufacturer who had decided to build our first graphics card, in particular 24-bit screen were deathly slow .... people would switch to 8-bit or even 1-bit to use things like Excel and word processors. I started out intending to design fast vector hardware (because autocad was a thing back then), the end though some serious benchmarking of real world usage meant that we zeroed in on simply making solid fills go really gas (Gbytes/sec, faster than any SGI machine of the time) - one of the big surprises was how fast Excel went with just this hardware speedup - turns out that at times excel would clear a window up to 9 times before ever drawing a useful pixel - all those 'important' black pixels I wanted to make hardware for (character rendering and vectors) were just noise in the traces. Not just MS: Pagemaker? did something stupid that invalidated the font cache many times a page, Quark? put 2 blank spaces at the end of every line that caused ATM to do stupid N*2 clipping behaviour ..... we could make great hardware and the software guys would just piss it away