"scott" <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
> I still remember my IT teacher at school telling me in 1995 that he heard
> the new Windows OS was going to have a "task bar", and how they had copied
> the Acorn design.  In fairness I doubt that whoever decided on the task bar
> had even seen an Acorn machine before.  Although there is a classic anecdote
> going around the Acorn world that apparently Bill Gates was once watching a
> demo from Acorn of how to network machines together, and he asked "what's a
> network?".

Heh, reminds me of font aa too. RISCOS had the most advanced font aa at the time
(still looks better than modern systems, although it doesn't matter so much with
screen res these days). I heard somewhere they tried to licence the tech to MS,
but didn't get anywhere... that might have changed the history of the uk pc
industry a little. Although I guess ARM did OK ;)

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Am 21.04.2010 16:33, schrieb Invisible:

> It didn't seem to me that that was the problem. Lacking graphics
> hardware acceleration doesn't make the HD thrash. And anyway, I thought
> the original VGA board had 2D acceleration?

Nope. Back then, even 2D hardware acceleration was still the sole domain 
of specialized display adapters, such as IBM's 8514/A (which later 
"fused" with VGA into XGA though if I'm not mistaken).

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> Heh, reminds me of font aa too. RISCOS had the most advanced font aa at 
> the time
> (still looks better than modern systems, although it doesn't matter so 
> much with
> screen res these days).

Shame they didn't use it for the default OS font until quite a lot later 
(although I think I had a hack to force it to be used in earlier versions). 
IIRC the default OS font was still using an 8x8x1bit bitmap from the old 
days, which was scaled up crudely when used in higher resolution screen 
modes.  It could have been done better IMO.

> I heard somewhere they tried to licence the tech to MS,
> but didn't get anywhere... that might have changed the history of the uk 
> pc
> industry a little. Although I guess ARM did OK ;)

Yeh, ARM designs are still used in a few processors last I heard :-)

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>> And anyway, I thought the original VGA board had 2D acceleration?
> 
> Nope. Back then, even 2D hardware acceleration was still the sole domain 
> of specialized display adapters, such as IBM's 8514/A (which later 
> "fused" with VGA into XGA though if I'm not mistaken).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vga

Claims that the original VGA card has "some support for raster ops". Of 
course, being Wikipedia, it doesn't elaborate further...

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Invisible wrote:
> Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> 
>> In Windows 7, apparently you can select a "tab" from the taskbar button.
>> Apps can tell the OS about the different tabs they have.
>> 
>> But I haven't used either Vista or 7, so that's not first-hand
>> experience.
> 
> Really? Mmm, interesting. I'll have to try that next time I fire up the
> Windows 7 VM...

Don't expect all your random apps to support the Win7-specific APIs to 
notify the OS about those tabs though :) But you can experiment with 
Internet Explorer.

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"scott" <sco### [at] scottcom> wrote:
> > Heh, reminds me of font aa too. RISCOS had the most advanced font aa at
> > the time
> > (still looks better than modern systems, although it doesn't matter so
> > much with
> > screen res these days).
>
> Shame they didn't use it for the default OS font until quite a lot later
> (although I think I had a hack to force it to be used in earlier versions).

Yeah agreed. Me too on the hack, although it became standard, what, mid-90s?
Just in time for everyone to go out and buy IBM-compatible PCs instead :(

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>>> In Windows 7, apparently you can select a "tab" from the taskbar button.
>>> Apps can tell the OS about the different tabs they have.
>>>
>>> But I haven't used either Vista or 7, so that's not first-hand
>>> experience.
>> Really? Mmm, interesting. I'll have to try that next time I fire up the
>> Windows 7 VM...
> 
> Don't expect all your random apps to support the Win7-specific APIs to 
> notify the OS about those tabs though :) But you can experiment with 
> Internet Explorer.

Or Office 2007. ;-)

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Am 21.04.2010 17:19, schrieb Invisible:
>>> And anyway, I thought the original VGA board had 2D acceleration?
>>
>> Nope. Back then, even 2D hardware acceleration was still the sole
>> domain of specialized display adapters, such as IBM's 8514/A (which
>> later "fused" with VGA into XGA though if I'm not mistaken).
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vga
>
> Claims that the original VGA card has "some support for raster ops". Of
> course, being Wikipedia, it doesn't elaborate further...

IIRC from my old days of programming graphics output, there were 
mechanisms in place to do fancy things that would allow you to do a 
single write where you'd normally need a read/modify/write combo - such 
as masking the pixels to affect with the write (as each byte would 
control multiple pixels), and maybe stuff like automatical XORing (so 
you could write a sprite on a background and later "un-write" it), but 
that's about as good as it got. Kind of 1D acceleration, so to speak.

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Warp wrote:
> > Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> >> Mostly because even on a PC with hardware far 
> >> in advance of what the Amiga has, Windows was *vastly* slower.
> > 
> >   Far in advance? 12MHz CPU (if you were rich), no hardware graphics
> > acceleration of any kind, 16 colors (again, if you were rich)... How is
> > that "far in advance of what the Amiga has"?

> Because the PCs at college had 133 MHz CPUs and 32 MB of RAM - multiple 
> times the Amiga's 7 MHz CPU (admittedly of completely different design) 
> and 2 MB of RAM. And yet, on such a machine, even something as simple as 
> closing a window causes huge amounts of disk thrashing.

  You are blaming Windows for something that the applications do (iow.
consume lots of memory)?

  If anything, you could blame Windows developers for being lazier or less
competent than Amiga developers, and I wouldn't have much to argue about
that. However, I don't really buy this "Windows was *vastly* slower than
Amiga, even though the hardware was considerably more advanced".

> >   Honestly, I just can't do *anything* in Windows, other than play games or
> > perhaps watch multimedia (if I don't happen to be in Linux just then).

> That pretty much describes me and Linux. Even something trivial like 
> configuring a network interface without DHCP seems excruciatingly hard 
> in Linux.

  Then you have either lied about trying OpenSUSE, or you have never even
opened Yast. Or you are exaggerating on purpose, for whatever reason.

> Under 
> Windows, you just right-click on the network interface and type in what 
> you want the settings to be.

  Exactly how this is relevantly different from Yast?

> > I'm always hindered by not
> > being able to do things I can easily do in Linux. Heck, even just finding
> > a file with a certain string is so damn hard in Windows, not to talk about
> > anything more advanced than that.

> ...why in the name of god would you ever want to do such a thing?

  That sounds such a "window'ish" question.

> And 
> wouldn't that require reading every individual byte of data on the 
> entire HD anyway, regardless of OS?

  You know, not every search must be done on every single file in the system.
You can actually limit searches to certain directories. Even in Windows.

  Ever heard of the magical word "grep"? Do you know what it's used for in
unix systems? If yes, and you understand why this utility has existed for,
like, forever, then why are you asking "why would you evern want to do such
a thing"?

  Maybe you don't need to search files containing a certain string, but many
other people do.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
>   Far in advance? 12MHz CPU (if you were rich), no hardware graphics
> acceleration of any kind, 16 colors (again, if you were rich)... How is
> that "far in advance of what the Amiga has"?

Even years later, with 100+MHz CPUs and better-than-VGA graphics, Windows 
still sucked balls at anything screen-oriented.  I remember watching a 
powerpoint slide ripple its way across the screen on a Windows machine a 
good 7 to 10 years after Amiga had a bouncing ball. :-)

> Heck, even just finding
> a file with a certain string is so damn hard in Windows, not to talk about
> anything more advanced than that.

Vista actually does this quite nicely.  Or in stall Agent Ransack.

>   (Yeah yeah, I know, you can do everything you can do in Linux and far more.
> There are all these fancy scripting languages and whatnot, which you might be
> able to use if you install something and something else. Nothing really
> consistent, and always a pain.)

Actually, it's way more consistent than Linux in terms of that. Everything 
is COM. Now, if you don't do COM, then sure, it's a pain in the ass. But the 
simple languages that can run any DLL and any application come with Windows 
nowadays.  You just have to learn something Windows-specific, and you have 
to stop trying to manipulate files that belong to other applications without 
using that application. :-0

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Linux: Now bringing the quality and usability of
   open source desktop apps to your personal electronics.

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