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http://prog21.dadgum.com/52.html
Heh heh heh.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".
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Darren New <dne### [at] san rrcom> wrote:
> http://prog21.dadgum.com/52.html
I know that guy, he's from the lambda-the-ultimate web forums. :) He also
mentions magnificent Infocom implementor Brian Moriarty of Trinity's fame, so
that's 10 geek points to him.
While he does put the python version to run 1000x over the Basic version, he
doesn't acknowledge the difference between 1984 hardware and, say, a P4. Yes,
undoubtedly any interpreted language nowadays is faster than old, line-by-line
intepreted Basic, but I guess not by the insane numbers he purports. Put that
qbasic to run that program on the same hardware as Python and let's talk... 5
points taken. :)
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> http://prog21.dadgum.com/52.html
It's like saying that Python is 1000 times faster than C by running the
C program in a computer made in 1980 and the Python program in a computer
made in 2009.
--
- Warp
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>The sieve in Atari BASIC, using timings from an article written in 1984 by
>Brian Moriarty, clocks in at: 324 seconds (or just under 5 and a half
>minutes) The Python version, running on hardware that's a generation
>back--no i7 processor or anything like that--completes in: 3 seconds
He draws the wrong conclusions. What he says amounts to the following:
The basic code on a 1 MHz PC in 1984 (very optimitic - probably the Atari
CPU was slower) ran 100x slower than python on a 2400 MHz single core (he
mentions old harware).
If both languages were on par, python should execute at least 2400 times
faster than the old code. Actually, it should execute even faster, since
CPUs got faster per MHz, too.
The (somewhat) right conclusions would be:
- computers got faster since 1984 (surprise)
- Python is being interpreted 24x slower than ancient BASIC (at least per
MHz)
However, all this is comparing apples to pears, like we say here in Germany.
What's the English term?
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TC <do-not-reply@i-do get-enough-spam-already-2498.com> wrote:
> However, all this is comparing apples to pears, like we say here in Germany.
> What's the English term?
http://www.sinfest.net/archive_page.php?comicID=1525
--
- Warp
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Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
> TC <do-not-reply@i-do get-enough-spam-already-2498.com> wrote:
> > However, all this is comparing apples to pears, like we say here in Germany.
> > What's the English term?
>
> http://www.sinfest.net/archive_page.php?comicID=1525
nice comix BTW :D
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poor orange :-(
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On 14-11-2009 19:11, nemesis wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> http://prog21.dadgum.com/52.html
>
> I know that guy, he's from the lambda-the-ultimate web forums. :) He also
> mentions magnificent Infocom implementor Brian Moriarty of Trinity's fame, so
> that's 10 geek points to him.
>
> While he does put the python version to run 1000x over the Basic version, he
> doesn't acknowledge the difference between 1984 hardware and, say, a P4. Yes,
> undoubtedly any interpreted language nowadays is faster than old, line-by-line
> intepreted Basic, but I guess not by the insane numbers he purports. Put that
> qbasic to run that program on the same hardware as Python and let's talk... 5
> points taken. :)
>
He was specifically comparing it with his (ours I am afraid) experience
with 8 bit hardware at *that* time. So you can not take points away for
that.
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Warp wrote:
> It's like saying that Python is 1000 times faster than C by running the
> C program in a computer made in 1980 and the Python program in a computer
> made in 2009.
The link in the first sentence takes you to where he explains what he's
talking about in the follow-up.
"""
Life is good if you have applications or tools or games that you want to
write. Even a language like Ruby, which tends to hang near the bottom of any
performance-oriented benchmark, is thousands of times faster than BASICs
that people were learning to program 8-bit home computers with in the 1980s.
"""
It's not a language shoot-out. It's saying "this is what 30 years of
progress brings, when a "slow" language is 100,000 times as fast as a "slow"
language from 1980."
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".
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On 11/14/2009 6:21 PM, andrel wrote:
> He was specifically comparing it with his (ours I am afraid) experience
> with 8 bit hardware at *that* time. So you can not take points away for
> that.
Yes you can.
Mike
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TC wrote:
> The basic code on a 1 MHz PC in 1984 (very optimitic - probably the Atari
> CPU was slower) ran 100x slower than python on a 2400 MHz single core (he
> mentions old harware).
Um, first, no. You didn't even read down to the end of the article, where he
explains it's 108,000 times as fast.
> - computers got faster since 1984 (surprise)
He wasn't being surprising. Look at the link at the top.
> - Python is being interpreted 24x slower than ancient BASIC (at least per
> MHz)
That isn't the point of the article. Indeed, the entire article is a follow
up to an article that says "Would you kindly STFU about which language is
faster, when they're all 100,000 times as fast as what you used at the start
of your career?"
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".
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On 11/14/2009 3:17 PM, TC wrote:
> The basic code on a 1 MHz PC in 1984 (very optimitic - probably the Atari
> CPU was slower) ran 100x slower than python on a 2400 MHz single core (he
> mentions old harware).
He says ~100000x not 100x. On the Python machine he's executing the
script 1000x times instead of 1x on the Basic machine.
Mike
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SharkD wrote:
> On 11/14/2009 6:21 PM, andrel wrote:
>> He was specifically comparing it with his (ours I am afraid) experience
>> with 8 bit hardware at *that* time. So you can not take points away for
>> that.
>
> Yes you can.
Only if you want to miss the entire f'ing point of the article.
"I hate Batman's costume. It's so scary!"
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".
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Well, I did not realize the code ran 1000 times. Must have skipped this when
reading the article). My mistake, sorry.
So: ashes on my head, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa ;-)
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.)
Things did speed up a bit since those days. ;-)
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> SharkD wrote:
> > On 11/14/2009 6:21 PM, andrel wrote:
> >> He was specifically comparing it with his (ours I am afraid) experience
> >> with 8 bit hardware at *that* time. So you can not take points away for
> >> that.
> >
> > Yes you can.
>
> Only if you want to miss the entire f'ing point of the article.
I'd say the article is badly written. I'm not supposed to know whatever
previous article says in order to understand the current one. This one simply
compares an old slow language in old hardware against new slow language in
modern hardware and comes up with a silly conclusion:
"If the Atari BASIC program ran a thousand times, it would finish after 324,000
seconds or 5400 minutes or almost four days. That means the Python version
is--get ready for this--108,000 times faster than the Atari BASIC code.
That's progress."
without acknowledging hardware differences... like implying Python is, what,
120000x faster than Basic...
In order to know that the point of the article is not that one gotta read the
previous one. As it is, without context, it FAILS.
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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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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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nemesis wrote:
> I'd say the article is badly written. I'm not supposed to know whatever
> previous article says in order to understand the current one.
1) It's a blog.
2) The first paragraph tells you what he's comparing.
> That's progress."
>
> without acknowledging hardware differences...
No. He's talking specifically about the hardware, as he says in the first
paragraph.
> In order to know that the point of the article is not that one gotta read the
> previous one.
That's why he quotes the previous one in the first paragraph, provides a
link, and says "here's more specific details of what I'm talking about.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".
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TC 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.
He too. Altho I never did much graphics on the TRS-80, I do remember letting
Mandelbrots run overnight on my Amiga. (Or was that still the Atari at that
point? I don't even remember.) Whatever, it was pretty amazing at the time. :-)
> Things did speed up a bit since those days. ;-)
And that is indeed the point of the article.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".
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nemesis wrote:
> In order to know that the point of the article is not that one gotta read the
> previous one. As it is, without context, it FAILS.
Actually, the problem is that you're *guessing* he's comparing languages
without taking into account the difference in hardware speed. In other
words, you're providing the *wrong* context by reading into the article
comparisons that aren't there, then getting complaining when the context you
invented doesn't match the actual context that you *didn't* read. Kind of
silly, really. :-)
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> nemesis wrote:
> > In order to know that the point of the article is not that one gotta read the
> > previous one. As it is, without context, it FAILS.
>
> Actually, the problem is that you're *guessing* he's comparing languages
> without taking into account the difference in hardware speed.
"If the Atari BASIC program ran a thousand times, it would finish after 324,000
seconds or 5400 minutes or almost four days. That means the Python version
is--get ready for this--108,000 times faster than the Atari BASIC code."
This is not guessing. This *is* a silly comparison, that's all, either being
the point of the article or not.
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nemesis wrote:
> This is not guessing. This *is* a silly comparison,
Huh. OK. I don't find it a silly comparison at all, unless you fixate on
the words "BASIC" and "Python" rather than on "Atari" and "Code I just wrote."
I'll keep on being impressed by the speed of advances in science and
technology. Feel free to take it all for granted and feel it's silly to be
impressed thereby. Your loss.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".
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andrel wrote:
> On 14-11-2009 19:11, nemesis wrote:
>> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>>> http://prog21.dadgum.com/52.html
>>
>> I know that guy, he's from the lambda-the-ultimate web forums. :) He
>> also mentions magnificent Infocom implementor Brian Moriarty of Trinity's
>> fame, so that's 10 geek points to him.
>>
>> While he does put the python version to run 1000x over the Basic version,
>> he
>> doesn't acknowledge the difference between 1984 hardware and, say, a P4.
>> Yes, undoubtedly any interpreted language nowadays is faster than old,
>> line-by-line
>> intepreted Basic, but I guess not by the insane numbers he purports. Put
>> that qbasic to run that program on the same hardware as Python and let's
>> talk... 5 points taken. :)
>>
>
> He was specifically comparing it with his (ours I am afraid) experience
> with 8 bit hardware at *that* time. So you can not take points away for
> that.
Yes, subjectively I think you can appreciate the difference even more.
Objectively there may be a few defensible arguments that it actually is "not
that fast".
Oh those days! I still remember thinking "64kb? Who on earth could need
more!" - a la Bill Gates - and that was when I got my first IBM PC (my Apple
][ had 16kb at the start, and 48kb later...!)
--
Stefan Viljoen
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On 15-11-2009 5:38, nemesis wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> nemesis wrote:
>>> In order to know that the point of the article is not that one gotta read the
>>> previous one. As it is, without context, it FAILS.
>> Actually, the problem is that you're *guessing* he's comparing languages
>> without taking into account the difference in hardware speed.
>
> "If the Atari BASIC program ran a thousand times, it would finish after 324,000
> seconds or 5400 minutes or almost four days. That means the Python version
> is--get ready for this--108,000 times faster than the Atari BASIC code."
>
> This is not guessing. This *is* a silly comparison, that's all, either being
> the point of the article or not.
>
I don't think it is. The point is that people complain about something
being 'slow' while it is more than 5 magnitudes faster than something
that was not considered slow in it's time. This article is not about
software or hardware but about human perception.
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On 15-11-2009 1:02, Darren New wrote:
> It's not a language shoot-out. It's saying "this is what 30 years of
> progress brings,
I didn't do the maths. Now I am feeling really old again, thanks Darren.
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On 15-11-2009 2:49, TC wrote:
> 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.
What I remember is that I was happy that it did it at all. Can't
remember being frustrated by the speed. More a challenge than a frustration.
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>> Now, all this is almost 30 years past. Maybe I misremember the time it
>> took, but I doubt it.
>
> What I remember is that I was happy that it did it at all. Can't remember
> being frustrated by the speed. More a challenge than a frustration.
Of course! You are perfectly right. I was just comparing the past to the
modern times.
And although, with hindsight and compared to modern computers was terrible
slow, at the time it was new and terrible fast. I remember the times of the
slide-rule - compared to using a slide-rule a VIC was a racehorse. It even
had 5x more memory than the eagle which landed on the moon. Those were the
very first days on personal computing and even a pocket calculator was a
new, expensive and exciting device.
I remember buying a 16k expansion for my VIC at a price (allowing for
inflation) you can buy a quad core today. Then came graphics cards on the
IBM PC - high-res in black and white. And everybody loved it. At the VIC's
time this kind of graphics was better than the one a really expensive PC
could deliver.
At one time or the other I did own or use most types of personal computers:
owned a VIC, a C64, an Amiga, used Atari and IBM PC at university. PC-AT,
PC-XT, PS2 - the whole palette. Never owned a partially-eaten fruit, though.
;-)
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TC <do-not-reply@i-do get-enough-spam-already-2498.com> wrote:
> Well, I do not know how old you are, but everything was SLOW back then.
I don't think a computer has ever existed where plotting n pixels, where
n is the width of the screen, takes 10 minutes (well, at least if we are
talking about computers which had a TV/monitor screen output). I would be
surprised if it took even 10 seconds in any such computer, even if you were
to plot *all* the pixels on screen individually (not just one pixel per
column).
After all, these computers were used for playing games, editing text,
programming and so on. They would be completely *unusable* if it took
minutes to draw a screenful.
Calculating a sine wave might take some time in a really old computer,
but still nowhere near 10 minutes. 10 seconds I could believe with a 70's
computer. Maybe.
> Even
> accessing memory locations using peek and poke did take some time.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_VIC-20
This computer was used to play games. Are you telling me it took 10 minutes
to update each frame? Or even 10 seconds?
I bet the framerate was probably more along the lines of 10 frames/s, if
not even faster.
(Yes, I know that in many old computers and game consoles drawing one
single pixel was much slower than drawing a hardware-supported sprite, but
I am still unwilling to believe the 10-minute claim. Even 10 seconds sounds
absurd, even if you are filling the entire screen.)
> 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.
I think that it's you who is far, far off. You make it sound that those
old processors supported floating point numbers or even multiplication in
the first place. Most of the old CPUs back then (eg. the Zilog Z80, which
was rather popular and used in many home computers) didn't support even
integer multiplication, much less floating point.
But even if you had to perform integer multiplication in software, it
would still not have taken anywhere in the range of minutes to fill up
a screen of pixels (unless calculating each pixel was heavy; eg. drawing
the Mandelbrot set back then could take hours, but not because it was slow
to draw, but because it's immensely slow to calculate).
--
- Warp
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TC wrote:
>
> And although, with hindsight and compared to modern computers was terrible
> slow, at the time it was new and terrible fast. I remember the times of the
> slide-rule - compared to using a slide-rule a VIC was a racehorse.
>
A slide rule, pure luxury. In my day we had to use log tables that we
calculated by hand. ;)
--
Best Regards,
Stephen
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andrel wrote:
> I didn't do the maths. Now I am feeling really old again, thanks Darren.
Welcome to the club!
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".
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nemesis wrote:
> In order to know that the point of the article is not that one gotta read the
> previous one.
No, actually. Now that I look at it again, you just have to read the title.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".
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Warp, don't take this bad. I mean not to insult you in any way - when
posting on the net things occasionally sound worse than they are meant. so
peace ;-)
I suppose you will not believe me, but a GAME back then was not what you
would consider a game. On the VIC you had exactly 3.583 BYTES of free memory
(not kilo, mega or gigabytes). Every single byte did count ;-) Hell, we even
used half-bytes, which were called nibbles. I dimly remember things like
binary coded decimals - some things are best forgotten.
The sound mentioned in the wikipedia-article did consist of three beepers, a
noise-generator and a way to control the loudness for all four:
Poke 36874, 128 : REM bass - range between 128-255
Poke 36874, 164 : REM tenor - range between 128-255
Poke 36874, 255 : REM soprano - range between 128-255
Poke 36874, 128 : REM noise - range between 128-255
Poke 36874, 15 : REM loundness, range between 0-15
Graphics were similar. What was considered a beautiful graphic was very
different from whatwe experience now.
Now, every really professional arcade game was programmed not in BASIC but
in 6502 assembler. I was talking about using BASIC to draw the graph.
Assembler was faster, of course.
However, the games were not in pixel-graphics needed to draw curves but in
ASCII-art. It is very easy to tell: on the VIC you could only display
characters. A character could be coloured in a few different colours (8, if
I remember correctly). Whenever you see a VIC-picture with colour graphics
you are looking at ASCII-art. When you wanted to use individual graphics you
had to copy 8x16 pixel characters to the memory, define these 16 bytes anew,
then put the character on the screen. You could then set the colour for the
whole 8x16 block of pixels.
I learned BASIC by typing in the listings of games and other programs. The
listings were to be found in computer magazines or books and had to be typed
in by hand. Here is an example of a more interesting game, "Hunt the
Wumpus":
http://www.atariarchives.org/morebasicgames/showpage.php?page=180
Here is another I remember:
http://www.atariarchives.org/morebasicgames/showpage.php?page=3
And this took some time to enter:
http://www.atariarchives.org/morebasicgames/showpage.php?page=144
A really spiffy graphics game I remember programming (or better: porting to
the VIC, for my own enjoyment) was a space-invaders clone. I used a ^ as
missile graphics, the UFO was a <X>, you get the picture ;-)
Later, on the C64, a way better and faster computer, when you were doing a
flood-fill with Simon's BASIC you could sit by and watch the picture to
complete. it would take quite a bit of time to do some really spiffy
graphics like the ones here:
http://www.lysator.liu.se/tolkien-games/entry/hobbit.html
When you think about those days, imagine feeding an arcade-machine with
half-dollars that plays the exciting game of PONG.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PONG
One of those was to be found at the municipal open-air pool...
About the original post: I really do not know anymore how long it actually
took to draw the curve. It was a very long time ago. I am absolutely sure
that I started the program, waited a bit admiring the curve drawing to
start, went to the bathroom, came back, waited a bit longer till it was
finished and showing the result to my parents. If this took 5 minutes, 10,
or 15, I really cannot say anymore.
All this brings back rather fond memories and it makes me feel REALLY OLD
for the first time...
I remember times when a phone-call to the US cost $2.50 per minute and when
this amount of money would buy you four large loafs of bread. Times when you
had to leave home and go to the public library when you wanted to do some
research for homework instead of googling or searching in wikipedia. Times
when you did a technical drawing you had to use compass, ruler and ink. And
had to do all again if you did draw a single false line (OK - if you were
lucky you might try to erase the wrong line or numer by using a razorblade,
but then you would get poits off from your instructor who would write "Fog?"
in the margin...)
Nowadays you are very lucky, more lucky than you will ever know.
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On 11/15/09 14:08, TC wrote:
> Nowadays you are very lucky, more lucky than you will ever know.
Same could be said of your generation when you were young.
--
Why is the person who invests all your money called a broker?
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TC <do-not-reply@i-do get-enough-spam-already-2498.com> wrote:
> Warp, don't take this bad. I mean not to insult you in any way - when
> posting on the net things occasionally sound worse than they are meant. so
> peace ;-)
You seem to assume that I'm some 15yo whose first computer was a PS2.
> I suppose you will not believe me, but a GAME back then was not what you
> would consider a game. On the VIC you had exactly 3.583 BYTES of free memory
> (not kilo, mega or gigabytes).
The Atari 2600 makes it better: 128 bytes of RAM. Yes, so?
And exactly what do you think I consider a game? Why wouldn't a VIC-20
or an Atari 2600 game be a game? Primitive (even by the time they still
were popular)? Definitely. Playable games? Why not?
> Every single byte did count ;-) Hell, we even
> used half-bytes, which were called nibbles. I dimly remember things like
> binary coded decimals - some things are best forgotten.
I really don't understand what binary coded decimals have to do with
space optimizations (given that they actually *waste* space compared to
native binary representation of numbers).
> The sound mentioned in the wikipedia-article did consist of three beepers, a
> noise-generator and a way to control the loudness for all four:
> Poke 36874, 128 : REM bass - range between 128-255
> Poke 36874, 164 : REM tenor - range between 128-255
> Poke 36874, 255 : REM soprano - range between 128-255
> Poke 36874, 128 : REM noise - range between 128-255
> Poke 36874, 15 : REM loundness, range between 0-15
That's luxury compared to the ZX Spectrum 48, which had one single
beeper and nothing else. Games and programs had to be content with that.
(Regardless, some games achieved pretty impressive music, taking into
account the limitation.)
> Now, every really professional arcade game was programmed not in BASIC but
> in 6502 assembler. I was talking about using BASIC to draw the graph.
> Assembler was faster, of course.
I still don't buy a *sine wave* taking *10 minutes* to draw, even if you
used BASIC.
Let's put it this way: The Vic-20 had a resolution of 176 x 184 pixels,
which means that to draw a regular sine wave you would need to evaluate
it 176 times and draw 176 pixels on screen for a full-width graphic.
If that takes 10 minutes it means that evaluating the sine function once
and drawing one pixel would take 3.4 seconds, ie. about 3.75 million clock
cycles (for a 1.1 MHz 6502 CPU)
Maybe if you implemented the sine function evaluation as the evaluation
of a fourier series, in BASIC, then it *might* take that 3.75 million clock
cycles to evaluate it once. If you do a lot of extra work. And probably using
a lot more accuracy than the vertical screen resolution would need.
I don't know if the Vic-20 BASIC had internal support for evaluating the
sine function, but if it did, I would be rather surprised if evaluating it
once would take 3.4 seconds.
> I learned BASIC by typing in the listings of games and other programs. The
> listings were to be found in computer magazines or books and had to be typed
> in by hand.
At least you didn't type gigantic hex listings, like me...
> Later, on the C64, a way better and faster computer, when you were doing a
> flood-fill with Simon's BASIC you could sit by and watch the picture to
> complete.
That would tell something about the speed of the BASIC interpreter rather
than the speed of the computer itself, given that eg. the "Second Reality"
demo has been "ported" to the C64, all parts included (including all the
real-time 3D graphics). And it's not even the best demo for the C64 in
existence. (Granted, the C64 version of "Second Reality" doesn't look exactly
as good as the PC version, but it looks very impressive taking into accout
the hardware it's running on.)
> All this brings back rather fond memories and it makes me feel REALLY OLD
> for the first time...
These are some pictures I drew with my first computer, a Spectrum 128:
http://warp.povusers.org/SpectrumPics/
(I was able to salvage these pictures from an old casette where I had saved
them, by using an emulator which was able to interpret the modulated data.
The Spectrum was not as capable graphically as eg. the NES, and had some
pretty bad limitations (described in that page), but with some effort you
could get pretty decent pictures for the era.)
> Nowadays you are very lucky, more lucky than you will ever know.
Please stop assuming I'm a 15yo.
--
- Warp
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TC wrote:
> I dimly remember things like
> binary coded decimals - some things are best forgotten.
>
Do you mind! I still use BCD. It is a good weak encryption, who else
knows it? ;) I remember nibbles as well :D
>
> I learned BASIC by typing in the listings of games and other programs. The
> listings were to be found in computer magazines or books and had to be typed
> in by hand.
>
Ugg!
> When you think about those days, imagine feeding an arcade-machine with
> half-dollars that plays the exciting game of PONG.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PONG
>
> One of those was to be found at the municipal open-air pool...
>
I could play using both hands and do you remember that you could put a
spin on the ball?
>
> All this brings back rather fond memories and it makes me feel REALLY OLD
> for the first time...
>
Fractint on a supper dupper XT LOL
> Times when you did a technical drawing you had to use compass, ruler
and ink.
>And had to do all again if you did draw a single false line (OK - if
you were
> lucky you might try to erase the wrong line or numer by using a razorblade,
Did you not use an Eraser Shield?
http://www.artifolk.co.uk/catalog/products/drawing_accessories/eraser_shield.htm
Old farts never die you merely wish they did ;)
--
Best Regards,
Stephen
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> Did you not use an Eraser Shield?
> http://www.artifolk.co.uk/catalog/products/drawing_accessories/eraser_shield.htm
>
I wish I had had one of those. Would have come in really handy.
> Old farts never die you merely wish they did ;)
LOL ;-)
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Warp wrote:
> Maybe if you implemented the sine function evaluation as the evaluation
> of a fourier series, in BASIC,
OK, I LOLed.
> At least you didn't type gigantic hex listings, like me...
Remember the magazines with the machine-readable barcode down the edges of
program listings? I never got that to work.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".
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Darren New wrote:
> "I hate Batman's costume. It's so scary!"
http://thosearentmuskets.com/sketches/batman.php
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> You seem to assume that I'm some 15yo whose first computer was a PS2.
More a like very bright 20-ish. ;-) How should I have known you were about
my age?
> And exactly what do you think I consider a game? Why wouldn't a VIC-20
> or an Atari 2600 game be a game? Primitive (even by the time they still
> were popular)? Definitely. Playable games? Why not?
Because I assumed you to be in your twenties. Sorry. But do you really think
a teen or a young twen would consider our first computer-games fun? A game
like emperor or pharaoh? Enter number of acres to be planted, enter grain to
be spend on subjects, x subjects died, y subjects were born - you know the
kind of game? When we were young this kind of stuff was fun - at least for
me. Or the original "Bard's tale" on the C64? Mangar attacks. Hero got
blasted for 56 points of damage? I was enticed with the partially animated
graphics - the Zombies were really gross. And the 3D labyrinths, the
pictures of the streets of Skara Brae, all new and exciting. But would a
teen today say that this is an interesting game?
Later I really liked nethack. But a game that uses a yellow "i" for an imp
is not what any person less than 25 years old would consider a fun game.
> I really don't understand what binary coded decimals have to do with
> space optimizations (given that they actually *waste* space compared to
> native binary representation of numbers).
And you are right: nothing at all. I was just strolling down memory lane. I
had some problem to solve with BCD back then. And trying to solve it I
stumbled upon the word "nibble" for a half-byte. Something younger people
will probably have never heard of, neither will they need to hear about
this. And thinking you to be much younger...
> I still don't buy a *sine wave* taking *10 minutes* to draw, even if you
> used BASIC.
I think the sine-function was not the problem. The drawing of the pixels
was. Maybe my method of determining which bits were set was the culprit, I
don't remember. Maybe PEEK and POKE did take extra time. I think you had no
bit-operators in Commodore Basic (or I did not know it had - I think the
"and / or" was only logical operators), so I may have used some math and
some loops that were not optimal. Again, I don't remember the details,
except that it took a lot of time to draw this curve. It was my first
computer, the manuals were written in English (a foreign language for me),
my first programming language and my first program that did draw a graph.
Besides, to get a smooth curve you had to compute more than one pixel per
column. Knowing my younger self I assume I'll have iterated from 0 - 360
degrees and converted this to radians. Which probably took some GOSUBs, as
did the encoding and decoding of the individual bits.
> At least you didn't type gigantic hex listings, like me...
A lot was done by entering DATA - byte values which were read and then poked
into memory for small graphics or machine language code. It was pretty much
the same, only in decimal. I remember the PC magazines had checksums at the
end of each line so correcting was possible if you entered the
checksum-generator first.
My first steps into 6502 assembler were done entirely by hand since I could
not afford a proper assembler-program. Got a book on assembler, did
translate the code into machine-language by hand. So I know of the joys of
entering hex values - assembler is something else I do not miss at all. ;-)
Make a mistake and the computer did freeze - then guess what went wrong for
want of a debugger.
>> Later, on the C64, a way better and faster computer, when you were doing
>> a
>> flood-fill with Simon's BASIC you could sit by and watch the picture to
>> complete.
>
> That would tell something about the speed of the BASIC interpreter rather
Yes. And that is part of the point. The very first post did compare BASIC to
Python and from there did compare computer speeds by the example of
interpreted languages.
> These are some pictures I drew with my first computer, a Spectrum 128:
> http://warp.povusers.org/SpectrumPics/
Nice. Especially the Ninja Turtles. Fond memories here, too ;-)
The Spectrum seems to have had way better graphics than the VIC. As I
already mentioned: you could not colour individual pixels, only individual
characters.
> Please stop assuming I'm a 15yo.
Sorry about this. ;-)
To put an end to a lengthy discussion: I told what I remember. I might
remember wrong, though I doubt it. I have no way to prove I remember the
correct time.
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TC wrote:
> Later I really liked nethack. But a game that uses a yellow "i" for an imp
> is not what any person less than 25 years old would consider a fun game.
>
I dunno, I still see young CS majors playing text MUDs on rare
occasions. And Dwarf Fortress, which while being a text game, could
never have run on any of my early computers.
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Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> http://prog21.dadgum.com/52.html
>
> It's like saying that Python is 1000 times faster than C by running the
> C program in a computer made in 1980 and the Python program in a computer
> made in 2009.
Yes, it is like saying that. That's the point too.
And C isn't as fast as Atari BASIC interpreter.
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Darren New wrote:
> He too. Altho I never did much graphics on the TRS-80, I do remember
> letting Mandelbrots run overnight on my Amiga. (Or was that still the
> Atari at that point? I don't even remember.) Whatever, it was pretty
> amazing at the time. :-)
Heh. On a 486SX, you can *watch* FractInt draw the individual pixels
while plotting, say, the lambda sin fractal. I would never have been
able to render a 48 megapixel image on such a machine!
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> While he does put the python version to run 1000x over the Basic version,
> he
> doesn't acknowledge the difference between 1984 hardware and, say, a P4.
Err, wasn't the whole point of the article to highlight the hardware
advances?
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scott wrote:
> Err, wasn't the whole point of the article to highlight the hardware
> advances?
Hence the title of the article.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".
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Hi, Darren,
completely off-topic and off-post:
> Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
> I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".
Did you really order those stamps? And if, what happened when you did use
them?
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wrote:
> I learned BASIC by typing in the listings of games and other programs. The
> listings were to be found in computer magazines or books and had to be
> typed in by hand. Here is an example of a more interesting game, "Hunt the
> Wumpus":
Hey, me too! I once spent 3 months typing in a logo interpreter from a book
I got at the library into my trust Apple ][ - and this was in the eigth
grade!
> A really spiffy graphics game I remember programming (or better: porting
> to the VIC, for my own enjoyment) was a space-invaders clone. I used a ^
> as missile graphics, the UFO was a <X>, you get the picture ;-)
Same thing here, only on the Apple ][ - which maybe had slightly better
graphics? I remember the raw excitement of
10 GR
20 PLOT...
> Later, on the C64, a way better and faster computer, when you were doing a
> flood-fill with Simon's BASIC you could sit by and watch the picture to
> complete. it would take quite a bit of time to do some really spiffy
> graphics like the ones here:
Ooo I remember the sloooooow floodfills... anybody played any of "Adventure
International"'s games on the ][?
> About the original post: I really do not know anymore how long it actually
> took to draw the curve. It was a very long time ago. I am absolutely sure
> that I started the program, waited a bit admiring the curve drawing to
> start, went to the bathroom, came back, waited a bit longer till it was
> finished and showing the result to my parents. If this took 5 minutes, 10,
> or 15, I really cannot say anymore.
I entered another program from a book that did this on the Apple ][ in about
nine or ten seconds - but then I think its 6502 might have been running at a
higher speed than the CPU used in Commodores of that age?
> All this brings back rather fond memories and it makes me feel REALLY OLD
> for the first time...
>
> I remember times when a phone-call to the US cost $2.50 per minute and
> when this amount of money would buy you four large loafs of bread. Times
> when you had to leave home and go to the public library when you wanted to
> do some research for homework instead of googling or searching in
> wikipedia.
Don't feel lonely. I'm just as old, and I'm feeling it too.
> Times when you did a technical drawing you had to use compass,
> ruler and ink.
I -hated- those!
> And had to do all again if you did draw a single false line
> (OK - if you were lucky you might try to erase the wrong line or numer by
> using a razorblade, but then you would get poits off from your instructor
> who would write "Fog?" in the margin...)
>
> Nowadays you are very lucky, more lucky than you will ever know.
Too true.
--
Stefan Viljoen
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Darren New wrote:
> Warp wrote:
>> Maybe if you implemented the sine function evaluation as the evaluation
>> of a fourier series, in BASIC,
>
> OK, I LOLed.
>
>> At least you didn't type gigantic hex listings, like me...
>
> Remember the magazines with the machine-readable barcode down the edges of
> program listings? I never got that to work.
Yes! I remember those.
Ever had something "saved" to an audio cassette, and you had to PLAY it back
to the computer? And if it played too softly or loudly it would be
scrambled?
I had games and stuff that used to take ten minutes to load this way.
Sometimes at 8 minutes it would fade just a little bit and you had to start
all over.
Granted this was in the early days even for the Apple ][ - later when you
could get the disc drives (floppy discs) for it, it was much better.
I remember doubling them (they held 120KB if I remember right) by turning a
store-bought one over, and cutting another write-protect notch at the
opposite side, so I could write on the "backside" of the disc, storing 240KB
(wow, that's a LOT!) on one disc.
The "backside" wasn't too reliable though. Mind you, neither was the "front"
of those discs. :)
--
Stefan Viljoen
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wrote:
>> You seem to assume that I'm some 15yo whose first computer was a PS2.
>
> More a like very bright 20-ish. ;-) How should I have known you were about
> my age?
>
>> And exactly what do you think I consider a game? Why wouldn't a VIC-20
>> or an Atari 2600 game be a game? Primitive (even by the time they still
>> were popular)? Definitely. Playable games? Why not?
>
> Because I assumed you to be in your twenties. Sorry. But do you really
> think a teen or a young twen would consider our first computer-games fun?
> A game like emperor or pharaoh? Enter number of acres to be planted, enter
> grain to be spend on subjects, x subjects died, y subjects were born - you
> know the kind of game? When we were young this kind of stuff was fun - at
> least for me. Or the original "Bard's tale" on the C64? Mangar attacks.
> Hero got blasted for 56 points of damage? I was enticed with the partially
> animated graphics - the Zombies were really gross. And the 3D labyrinths,
> the pictures of the streets of Skara Brae, all new and exciting. But would
> a teen today say that this is an interesting game?
I fully agree. These days the blink and twitch kiddies would not spend ten
seconds in something like Bard's tale. Or "Santa Paravia" on the Apple ][.
But when I played them... man! What a wet dream that was.
>> I really don't understand what binary coded decimals have to do with
>> space optimizations (given that they actually *waste* space compared to
>> native binary representation of numbers).
>
> And you are right: nothing at all. I was just strolling down memory lane.
> I had some problem to solve with BCD back then. And trying to solve it I
> stumbled upon the word "nibble" for a half-byte. Something younger people
> will probably have never heard of, neither will they need to hear about
> this. And thinking you to be much younger...
Nybble? At least I thought it was spelled that way. It seems to have fallen
into disuse (I only encountered it once after my Apple ][ finally burned out
- it was some custom station control electronics we used to have in the
dispatching center at the fire station.)
>> I still don't buy a *sine wave* taking *10 minutes* to draw, even if you
>> used BASIC.
Yeah, but then, not everybody is as math wise as Warp is. I chanced upon
some old listings of BASIC I did when I got my first IBM PC in 1984 / 1985
and I'm -amazed- at how stupid and primitive most of the stuff I tried was,
and how primitive the environments - no IDE, no editor as such, no debugger,
no profiler, no switch{}... No wonder such a thing might be slow - those
days the hardware was so underpowered and you had to be incredibly fly to do
something quickly and with no tricks.
> I think the sine-function was not the problem. The drawing of the pixels
> was. Maybe my method of determining which bits were set was the culprit, I
> don't remember. Maybe PEEK and POKE did take extra time. I think you had
> no bit-operators in Commodore Basic (or I did not know it had - I think
> the "and / or" was only logical operators), so I may have used some math
> and some loops that were not optimal. Again, I don't remember the details,
> except that it took a lot of time to draw this curve. It was my first
> computer, the manuals were written in English (a foreign language for me),
> my first programming language and my first program that did draw a graph.
Same here. One of the greatest driving forces for me to learn English was to
be able to read all those programming books.
> A lot was done by entering DATA - byte values which were read and then
> poked into memory for small graphics or machine language code. It was
> pretty much the same, only in decimal. I remember the PC magazines had
> checksums at the end of each line so correcting was possible if you
> entered the checksum-generator first.
Yes, I can remember headaches while still in primary school, going late into
the night despite repeated threats of parents to go to bed for the next
day's maths exam. Staring at pages, so tired the letters are swimming in
front of your eyes, trying to find the blasted POKE in line 982 that is
messing up the nice graphic you want to draw.
> My first steps into 6502 assembler were done entirely by hand since I
> could not afford a proper assembler-program. Got a book on assembler, did
> translate the code into machine-language by hand. So I know of the joys of
> entering hex values - assembler is something else I do not miss at all.
> ;-) Make a mistake and the computer did freeze - then guess what went
> wrong for want of a debugger.
I was never this hardcore. I remember the
c0b8 d1b3 e1fa ff4a 1aac 1d1a
*
the Apple would display as its assembler "interface". I usually hit CTRL-
RESET at that point.
>>> Later, on the C64, a way better and faster computer, when you were doing
>>> a
>>> flood-fill with Simon's BASIC you could sit by and watch the picture to
>>> complete.
>>
>> That would tell something about the speed of the BASIC interpreter
>> rather
Floodfilling used to fascinate me - probably because I never managed to
implement it and there were NO libraries that did it for you.
It really does seem much easier these days.
--
Stefan Viljoen
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TC <do-not-reply@i-do get-enough-spam-already-2498.com> wrote:
> > I still don't buy a *sine wave* taking *10 minutes* to draw, even if you
> > used BASIC.
> I think the sine-function was not the problem. The drawing of the pixels
> was. Maybe my method of determining which bits were set was the culprit, I
> don't remember. Maybe PEEK and POKE did take extra time.
I still have hard time believing some peeks and pokes consuming 3 million
clock cycles in order to draw one pixel, no matter what the system.
> Besides, to get a smooth curve you had to compute more than one pixel per
> column.
A smooth curve? What do you mean? Like antialiasing? Color gradients?
On a Vic-20?
> The Spectrum seems to have had way better graphics than the VIC.
Quite poorer than most systems of the time. Only 16 (well 15 in practice)
fixed colors (no palette of any kind), and you can use only 2 colors for
each 8x8 pixels square on screen. This limits graphical possibilities quite
a lot (and many games had to be extremely ingenuous to try to circumvent
this limitation; most games didn't even bother and just used full-screen
2-color graphics). Forget about eg. smooth scrolling of colored images.
Most other systems had hardware tiles and sprites. For example on the NES
you could use 4 colors (from a palette of almost 64) on each 16x16 pixel
background tile, and you could scroll this background smoothly. Additionally,
you could have a number of 8x8 sprites at any location on screen (with
certain limitations), and these sprites could use 4 colors each (one of them
could optionally be transparent), independently of the background tiles.
Since the tiles and sprites were handled by hardware they didn't stress the
CPU, and thus you could achieve more impressive graphics even though the
CPU was much slower than the one on the Spectrum.
--
- Warp
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TC wrote:
> Did you really order those stamps? And if, what happened when you did use
> them?
I'm afraid not. I was just having a Steven Wright moment a few weeks ago...
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".
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