I've been coding for over 20 years now! (WOAH, do I feel old)
I've touched just about every resource imaginable under the Sun (too bad they were bought out by Oracle)
When the "console", "terminal" or "command prompt" was really just this thing called "DOS"
And it had QBasic. And QBasic was a godsend for learning how the computer actually worked!
Speaking of learning how things worked... Drawing graphics in QBasic? You interacted directly with the video card. There were no drivers. You would have to manually setup which VGA mode you wanted, such as 320x240 pixel with 16 colors. And then very single dot had to be manually plotted on the screen! There were a few libraries for drawing primitives, but these literally did the same thing, CPU based drawing to a generic frame buffer.
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
It's pronounced Diane. I do data architecture, operations, and backend development. In my spare time I maintain Massive.js, a data mapper for Node.js and PostgreSQL.
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
I've been coding for over 20 years now! (WOAH, do I feel old)
I've touched just about every resource imaginable under the Sun (too bad they were bought out by Oracle)
I've been coding for over 20 years now! (WOAH, do I feel old)
I've touched just about every resource imaginable under the Sun (too bad they were bought out by Oracle)
MOSTLY YES! But there was also some odd-ball hardware that was 16-bit transfers instead of 8-bit. So to draw a single pixel, you had to read two bytes, replace one, then write two bytes back. HOWEVER though, this also meant that just raw performance of painting was twice as fast, as you could draw two pixels in a single operation, if you already knew what both were going to be! (like copying frame buffer for example)
30+ years of tech, retired from an identity intelligence company, now part-time with an insurance broker.
Dev community mod - mostly light gardening & weeding out spam :)
For those who get a kick out of wrangling old hardware to do things it was never designed to.. this back in 2015 blew me away when I found it: int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-102...
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When the "console", "terminal" or "command prompt" was really just this thing called "DOS"
And it had QBasic. And QBasic was a godsend for learning how the computer actually worked!
Speaking of learning how things worked... Drawing graphics in QBasic? You interacted directly with the video card. There were no drivers. You would have to manually setup which VGA mode you wanted, such as 320x240 pixel with 16 colors. And then very single dot had to be manually plotted on the screen! There were a few libraries for drawing primitives, but these literally did the same thing, CPU based drawing to a generic frame buffer.
But did you ever have to engage int he joy that was "shape tables"?
Having to choose between 640x480 with 16 colors or 320x200 with 256 was agonizing back in the day!
But damn the plaids were great. :p
Color, or resolution... PICK ONE!
Color! Plus 320x200x256 was easy to address because every pixel was a byte in an array.
MOSTLY YES! But there was also some odd-ball hardware that was 16-bit transfers instead of 8-bit. So to draw a single pixel, you had to read two bytes, replace one, then write two bytes back. HOWEVER though, this also meant that just raw performance of painting was twice as fast, as you could draw two pixels in a single operation, if you already knew what both were going to be! (like copying frame buffer for example)
For those who get a kick out of wrangling old hardware to do things it was never designed to.. this back in 2015 blew me away when I found it: int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-102...