4 ms·

The reason it has taken the demoscene so long to pull this off is the same reason that the PC beat its competitors in the early 1980's. From the beginning the

by dzdt 12y ago

The reason it has taken the demoscene so long to pull this off is the same reason that the PC beat its competitors in the early 1980's. From the beginning the PC wasn't defined by a single hardware implementation, but by a set of capabilities and interfaces. There were always "compatible" PC knockoffs and "compatible" extension cards that weren't really 100% bug-for-bug compatible. That meant that software writers had to stick pretty much to the approved interfaces. There was no sense trying to push the hardware beyond the intended capabilities because even if you succeeded it probably wouldn't work on the bulk of the machines out there with different variations of the hardware. It took a long time even to see things like scrolling games on EGA cards, even though the scroll registers were designed right into the chip and documented as such. Why? Because there were no BIOS calls to implement this, and most developers took the limits of BIOS as the limits of what they could count on working. It took risky shareware developers (Carmack and Romero) to prove to everyone that really the EGA chip-level interface was a usable target. So because of the prevalence of the mostly-compatible compatibles, the PC software market had another layer of abstraction built in. Software should work on any machine providing the documented capabilities and interfaces, not just on one exact hardware setup. This allowed for a cycle of compatible upgrades where software could be used across hardware generations, and hardware could upgrade with sufficient backward compatibility. That upgrade cycle was missing for machines like the Commodore 64, which were defined by a single hardware implementation. For the Commodore, developers always felt free to push beyond the intended limitations of the hardware, with confidence that if it would work it would work everywhere. That fed a vibrant demoscene, but closed off any possibility of a hardware/software upgrade cycle and eventually led to the death of the computer line.

lukasb 12y ago
thanks for this, fascinating
ChuckMcM 12y ago
Hence the quote "there is MS DOS compatible, PC DOS compatible, and FlightSimulator Compatibe, in increasing orders of difficulty." Later 'Jet' provided some test indication as well. I was always amazed because CP/M machines were all different sort of by design, it was the sheer quantity of the original 5150 PC that made it worth specializing for that target. I later owned an Epson QX-10 with an "MS-DOS" card. And simply MS-DOS compatible ran hardly any software at all!
jerf 12y ago
This is why, despite growing up a Commodore kid, I've never really sat and wondered about the "could have been" very much like some people have... even if Commodore had survived they would have been in ever-growing trouble with their architecture and there's no reason to believe that whatever they put out in, say, 1995 would be any particularly better or worse than what we really got, because it would pretty much be a full rewrite anyhow.
- frozenport 12y ago
  Might have fared exactly like Apple in the 90s? Trying to push a 80s architecture and system in 1999?
  - jerf 12y ago
    And part of my point is precisely that in the subsequent rewrite, the OS-level specialness of Apple is now essentially gone. (Apple itself of course has a distinct identity.) While I do not necessarily believe where we are today is completely inevitable, I do also tend to think that it's an awfully strong local optima. (People often come up with radical ideas for alternate approaches but IMHO have a hard time proving alternate approaches are generally better, as opposed to better for a very particular use case.)
bluedino 12y ago
Why didn't this work out for high-end Android handsets? They are in a similar situation.
- fit2rule 12y ago
  Android has too many other stumbling blocks that make this sort of social innovation happen - in Androids' case, I believe, there are far, far too many clones with variance in the implementation of the standard that make it impractical to target the broader platform for such tricks. One the one hand. On the other hand, getting newer Android releases running on, for example, the G1DEV phone is an example of how this ethos has persisted, even on Android.
- FigBug 12y ago
  By 'this' do you mean why didn't Android completely beat iPhone? Similar reason to why the Mac is making a comeback. The hardware market has changed. In the 80s / 90s, computers were very expensive and it was common to only buy exactly what you needed. PCs excelled at this. Everything was an option: Video card (MDA, CGA, EGA, VGA), ram, hard drive, hard drive controller, serial port controller, sound card. If you later needed more capabilities you upgraded whatever was necessary. As computers became cheaper, upgrading began to make less financial sense. Upgrading a component and paying for it to be installed became almost equal to the cost of a new computer. There also became less to upgrade, onboard sound, network, etc was good enough. The only thing left to upgrade was CPU (but usually required a new motherboard) and video card. Upgradability which was originally a huge selling point became a niche feature. As integration continued, size, weight, power consumption all became more important than upgradability / customization. Hardware wise, all Android phones and the iPhone are pretty much the same.
  - AJ007 12y ago
    I wonder how long throwing away 'computers' after a year or two of use will remain common for us in the first world. Does technology get the credit for the difference between the 80s, or is it some mix of the current balance of geo-politics, interconnected global trade, wage arbitrage that still allows slavery in the supply chain, and free interest rates (in the case of Europe, negative)? May be in the end game biodegradable 'computanium' that is killed and reborn daily right before it becomes obsolete? It still feels very strange and disturbing to throw away something less than a decade old much less two years.

by dzdt 12y ago

lukasb 12y ago

thanks for this, fascinating

ChuckMcM 12y ago

Hence the quote "there is MS DOS compatible, PC DOS compatible, and FlightSimulator Compatibe, in increasing orders of difficulty." Later 'Jet' provided some test indication as well. I was always amazed because CP/M machines were all different sort of by design, it was the sheer quantity of the original 5150 PC that made it worth specializing for that target. I later owned an Epson QX-10 with an "MS-DOS" card. And simply MS-DOS compatible ran hardly any software at all!

jerf 12y ago

This is why, despite growing up a Commodore kid, I've never really sat and wondered about the "could have been" very much like some people have... even if Commodore had survived they would have been in ever-growing trouble with their architecture and there's no reason to believe that whatever they put out in, say, 1995 would be any particularly better or worse than what we really got, because it would pretty much be a full rewrite anyhow.

frozenport 12y ago
Might have fared exactly like Apple in the 90s? Trying to push a 80s architecture and system in 1999?
- jerf 12y ago
  And part of my point is precisely that in the subsequent rewrite, the OS-level specialness of Apple is now essentially gone. (Apple itself of course has a distinct identity.) While I do not necessarily believe where we are today is completely inevitable, I do also tend to think that it's an awfully strong local optima. (People often come up with radical ideas for alternate approaches but IMHO have a hard time proving alternate approaches are generally better, as opposed to better for a very particular use case.)

bluedino 12y ago

Why didn't this work out for high-end Android handsets? They are in a similar situation.

fit2rule 12y ago
Android has too many other stumbling blocks that make this sort of social innovation happen - in Androids' case, I believe, there are far, far too many clones with variance in the implementation of the standard that make it impractical to target the broader platform for such tricks. One the one hand. On the other hand, getting newer Android releases running on, for example, the G1DEV phone is an example of how this ethos has persisted, even on Android.
FigBug 12y ago
By 'this' do you mean why didn't Android completely beat iPhone? Similar reason to why the Mac is making a comeback. The hardware market has changed. In the 80s / 90s, computers were very expensive and it was common to only buy exactly what you needed. PCs excelled at this. Everything was an option: Video card (MDA, CGA, EGA, VGA), ram, hard drive, hard drive controller, serial port controller, sound card. If you later needed more capabilities you upgraded whatever was necessary. As computers became cheaper, upgrading began to make less financial sense. Upgrading a component and paying for it to be installed became almost equal to the cost of a new computer. There also became less to upgrade, onboard sound, network, etc was good enough. The only thing left to upgrade was CPU (but usually required a new motherboard) and video card. Upgradability which was originally a huge selling point became a niche feature. As integration continued, size, weight, power consumption all became more important than upgradability / customization. Hardware wise, all Android phones and the iPhone are pretty much the same.
- AJ007 12y ago
  I wonder how long throwing away 'computers' after a year or two of use will remain common for us in the first world. Does technology get the credit for the difference between the 80s, or is it some mix of the current balance of geo-politics, interconnected global trade, wage arbitrage that still allows slavery in the supply chain, and free interest rates (in the case of Europe, negative)? May be in the end game biodegradable 'computanium' that is killed and reborn daily right before it becomes obsolete? It still feels very strange and disturbing to throw away something less than a decade old much less two years.