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This is partially true...This is partially true...Posted Nov 18, 2011 23:34 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784)In reply to: This is partially true... by khim Parent article: Interview with Andrew Tanenbaum (LinuxFr.org)
On LISP and Java machines? Care to share a link? Lisp advocates were always talking about NASA making hot-fixes on space probes - it was surely one of Paul Graham's standard dinner party stories - and as everyone else started to use other languages, such tales of past glory appeared to be the only comfort to the community. There were graphic accelerators back then for performing specialized rendering (like sprite animation) and by 90-s they all but disappeared from most of the hardware since software rendering became fast enough.Sorry, but you, again, are rewriting history. PC had no graphic acceleration initially. No, the history goes back a bit more than the PC as you know it. Various microcomputers had dedicated sprite hardware, which is hardly a surprise given that as video circuitry became more sophisticated, it made sense to solve various common problems in hardware instead of having the CPU blit sprites to the display buffer. Eventually, CPUs became powerful enough to be able to dedicate some of their time to blitting and have enough time left over to do other things, and since some of the special video architectures were actively obstructive to other tasks, they were given the push.
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