4 ms·

The H-100 was really very nice, but it was already too late for anything not PC compatible.

by pinewurst 5y ago

rbanffy 5y ago
Yeah… the H100 is one I’d love to play with.
- kragen 5y ago
  I spent a fair bit of time with a Z-100. It was indeed pretty great; MS-DOS ("Z-DOS") was a big improvement over HDOS, but the graphics were the biggest draw for me, being roughly EGA-class. It lacked speed and compatibility, though, and IIRC sound. Also, my dad's monitor was monochrome, so it lacked color, too. I hated that green.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    Just by running MS-DOS and not having that garish CGA font makes it already a winner. A lot of companies thought that making a better computer was enough, but the PC was so poorly designed that people had to write software that directly used the hardware to make it run at bearable speeds. This nullified any advantage those who built better PCs had.
    - kragen 5y ago
      Not sure what was so wrong with the design; I recall people would bypass BIOS calls for speed but I never understood why. I guess there was no BitBlt or set-multiple-pixels call, so you incurred call-and-return overhead for every pixel drawn? Later I ran AutoCAD on a PC-XT with a CGA and an MDA. The graphics were on the CGA, but all the text was on the MDA screen, which had, I think, a slightly nicer font; the lack of a shadow mask made the letterforms break up less, although it was the same shitty green phosphor as the Z-100. Even bypassing the BIOS, line drawing was slow enough that when you erased a line it would just draw the line in the background color, leaving spaces wherever it intersected anything else; periodically you would have to type REDRAW and wait a second or two, which would have been unbearable if you had to do it after every erasure. Games got by with blits to small parts of the screen, commonly with XOR (a trick AutoCAD used for drawing the crosshairs and rubberband lines, and ended up having to pay a patent troll for). Some, like ASTROTIT (nsfw), managed to draw a fixed background with sprites on top of it, redrawing it when they passed. This was the era when 3-D CAD systems still used "calligraphic" displays from Evans & Sutherland (called "random stroke CRTs" in less pompous times), like the vector displays used in the arcade games Tempest and Star Wars, but so expensive I never saw one in my life. You could do 3-D on a CGA (3-DEMON was a super fun first-person CGA Pac-Man clone, like an FPS but with no shooting) but at its shitty resolution, 640x200 (or half that if you wanted color), and updating the whole CGA screen was, as I said, noticeably slow. The same 16 kilobytes of RAM used for a vector display would have been enough to put 5000 lines on a 4096x4096 "calligraphic" display, and you could move any of them whenever you wanted --- or change the camera matrix.

The H-100 was really very nice, but it was already too late for anything not PC compatible.

rbanffy 5y ago

Yeah… the H100 is one I’d love to play with.

kragen 5y ago
I spent a fair bit of time with a Z-100. It was indeed pretty great; MS-DOS ("Z-DOS") was a big improvement over HDOS, but the graphics were the biggest draw for me, being roughly EGA-class. It lacked speed and compatibility, though, and IIRC sound. Also, my dad's monitor was monochrome, so it lacked color, too. I hated that green.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  Just by running MS-DOS and not having that garish CGA font makes it already a winner. A lot of companies thought that making a better computer was enough, but the PC was so poorly designed that people had to write software that directly used the hardware to make it run at bearable speeds. This nullified any advantage those who built better PCs had.
  - kragen 5y ago
    Not sure what was so wrong with the design; I recall people would bypass BIOS calls for speed but I never understood why. I guess there was no BitBlt or set-multiple-pixels call, so you incurred call-and-return overhead for every pixel drawn? Later I ran AutoCAD on a PC-XT with a CGA and an MDA. The graphics were on the CGA, but all the text was on the MDA screen, which had, I think, a slightly nicer font; the lack of a shadow mask made the letterforms break up less, although it was the same shitty green phosphor as the Z-100. Even bypassing the BIOS, line drawing was slow enough that when you erased a line it would just draw the line in the background color, leaving spaces wherever it intersected anything else; periodically you would have to type REDRAW and wait a second or two, which would have been unbearable if you had to do it after every erasure. Games got by with blits to small parts of the screen, commonly with XOR (a trick AutoCAD used for drawing the crosshairs and rubberband lines, and ended up having to pay a patent troll for). Some, like ASTROTIT (nsfw), managed to draw a fixed background with sprites on top of it, redrawing it when they passed. This was the era when 3-D CAD systems still used "calligraphic" displays from Evans & Sutherland (called "random stroke CRTs" in less pompous times), like the vector displays used in the arcade games Tempest and Star Wars, but so expensive I never saw one in my life. You could do 3-D on a CGA (3-DEMON was a super fun first-person CGA Pac-Man clone, like an FPS but with no shooting) but at its shitty resolution, 640x200 (or half that if you wanted color), and updating the whole CGA screen was, as I said, noticeably slow. The same 16 kilobytes of RAM used for a vector display would have been enough to put 5000 lines on a 4096x4096 "calligraphic" display, and you could move any of them whenever you wanted --- or change the camera matrix.