> nemesis schrieb:
> 
>> I can imagine.  Back then, there were no 3D accelerator cards, no 
>> Playstation.
>> Just simple 2D bitmaps on screen...
> 
> 
> High!
> 
'Low!    ;-)

> Oh glorious CGS pioneer days... I remember, back in summer of 1991, 
> staring totally stunned at at endlessly looped animation running on an 
> 80386 on display in a computer store showcase (by the way, in the 
> medieval Old City of Augsburg, Germany), which showed (what else?) a 
> RSOCP orbited by several smaller RSOCPs!
> 
I also remember that image well -- it was fairly well-known at the time. 
  There was another cyclic image at about the same time of a rotating 
clown's head.  They were both said to be created with POVRay -- the 
first I had heard of it.  And I agree that these were very impressive at 
that time.

A couple years ago I decided to try to reproduce this image myself -- 
and this is virtually my only stab at animation.  I'll attach the source 
to this message (it's quite short, <50 lines) if anyone wants to play 
with it.  One difference from the original is that the original was a 
2x2 red and white checkerboard and mine is 4x4.  I don't remember what 
the original background was, mine is a simple sky_sphere.

> I myself back then had an Atari 1040 STFM to type my papers for college, 
> 1 meg of RAM, which came with  a monochrome 11" monitor... but to change 
> from 640 x 400 monochrome to 320 x 200 color mode, I hade to plug it to 
> a color TV set... in the following year, I bought myself a second-hand 
> Amiga 500, hoping to catch a very first glimpse of 3D graphics (as I 
> started to toy with the idea of "Khyberspace", a virtual Afghanistan), 
> but it wasn't until 1995 that I discovered PoV-Ray!
> 
I don't remember what hardware I was running at that time, but I think 
it was a Heathkit H-100 (same as a Zenith Z-100, but in kit form).  This 
came out about the same time as the IBM PC and also used the 8088. 
(Actually it was a dual processor, 8088 and 8080, and could run 8-bit 
C/PM, or 16-bit C/PM-86 or MSDOS.)  I still think it was a better design 
than the IBM, but of course, IBM had the name and reputation so the 
industry followed them.

The color graphics on the Heath/Zenith was FAR superior to the 
then-current IBM CGA (I still that think was the worst looking graphics 
card ever!).  But the only directly available way to use or program the 
Zenith graphics was through MS-BASIC.  To me, this was unacceptable 
because I was programming in C at the time (hobby programming, never 
professional -- and although I haven't done much programming lately, 
when I do it's still C or C++).  The Heath/Zenith graphics documentation 
was very minimal, and accessing it was very strange (non-contiguous use 
of graphics memory, separate segments for the three colors...).  But I 
was finally able to write my own graphics library for C, somewhat 
limited but still useful.

I could go into more detail, but this is already getting too long (and 
very off-topic) so I'd better quit.  Besides, this stuff is probably 
older than many of the readers of this forum.  I still have my original 
Altair, unused and stuffed in a closet, but I still have it -- 30+ years 
old!

> See you on www.khyberspace.de!
> 
> Yadgar
> 
      -=- Larry -=-

> Now playing: Pteranodon (Ozric Tentacles)

Now playing:  Beethoven Symphony #6

PS.  Just before posting this, I decided to attach the image also -- 
first frame only, not the animation...

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