Well, I do not know how old you are, but everything was SLOW back then. Even 
accessing memory locations using peek and poke did take some time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_VIC-20

Now, all this is almost 30 years past. Maybe I misremember the time it took, 
but I doubt it.

Back then you tried everything to increase speed. Instead of dividing by pi 
you manually computed 1/pi and used this as a factor (muliplication was way 
faster than division), instead of using x^2 you used x*x (faster ;-), I 
think you get the picture. But if you did not experience this first hand, 
you will not believe it.

"Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> schrieb im Newsbeitrag 
news:4aff4e5b@news.povray.org...
> TC <do-not-reply@i-do get-enough-spam-already-2498.com> wrote:
>> Besides, I am a veteran from those days, too. Drawing my first sine-curve 
>> on
>> a CRT took a really long time, 10 minutes or so.
>
>> (No, not the math did take much time: you had to fill the screen with
>> characters from 0-255, remap the dot-matrices of the characters into RAM,
>> then calculate individual points position and set the appropriate bits in
>> the character's 16 bytes dot-matrix. Actually the 3.5kB RAM did not 
>> suffice
>> to hold all characters and the BASIC program, so the lower right part of 
>> the
>> screen was always blank.)
>
>  That still doesn't explain the 10 minutes. Might explain 10 seconds, if
> even that much.
>
> -- 
>                                                          - Warp

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