Kids react to an Apple II

[Roger]

So ran across this and thought it might be good for a couple laughs for everyone else:

 

[robcat2075]

Those kids are too photogenic.

 

I don't recall any of my fellow nine-year-olds being that articulate.

 

Maybe they're all from the drama club.

[Roger]

Those kids are too photogenic.

 

I don't recall any of my fellow nine-year-olds being that articulate.

 

Maybe they're all from the drama club.

 

Oh I agree, they were carefully chosen. These aren't your average 9 year olds they just pulled off the street (I think, anyway).

My favorite part of the video was when the adult explained it has no internet and you have to type all the commands in, and the little girl gives him this look like "I don't even hear the words you are saying". LOL

 

Modern desktops blow these machines away in every category. Even a budget Android phone has infinitely more capability. Odd when you think about it, that the average American has more computing power in their pocket than the entire country had in 1969.

[robcat2075]

If I think about it, most of that computing power is devoted to making the computer more accessible rather than presenting us with more complicated endeavors to do.

 

It takes a lot of power to run the GUI but we're doing fairly mundane things... reading, searching, texting and messaging mostly... with it.

 

But then there are A:M users like ourselves who are doing real future stuff like 3-D modeling that wasn't feasible with that Apple II.

[Roger]

For comparison, first computer I ever owned was a 286 (this was cobbled out of spares at a time when a 386 was more common)

 

Hard disk (none), later upgraded to 30MB full height

16mhz 286 cpu, no mathco

1mb of RAM

4 color CGA graphics, later updated to VGA

1 5.25 and 1 3.5" floppy drive

No networking, but I had a 2400bps modem

Sound: PC speaker upgraded later to Sound Blaster

 

There were of course no 3d graphics at the time, at least not the way we think of them, but the cpu could push around a couple hundred (Dozen? I know flat-shaded low poly games were possible back then) polygons maybe at 320x200.

 

Compared to my modern machine:

Core i7 with probably tens of thousands of times more speed

16GB of RAM

750GB of disk space

3d graphics capable of full HD and several billion polys per second

Wired and wireless networking, 3G with a dongle

Surround Sound (using some kind of positional audio)

[Roger]

If I think about it, most of that computing power is devoted to making the computer more accessible rather than presenting us with more complicated endeavors to do.

 

It takes a lot of power to run the GUI but we're doing fairly mundane things... reading, searching, texting and messaging mostly... with it.

 

But then there are A:M users like ourselves who are doing real future stuff like 3-D modeling that wasn't feasible with that Apple II.

 

Oh totally. Most of that is devoted to the interface. There is a lot of stuff on a modern PC that boils down to making text processing attractive. And there is nothing stopping you from using an ancient PC to write a novel (in fact, the Game of Thrones guy uses Wordstar on a 30 year old PC with no internet).

 

So if you want to write a novel, or do a simple database or spreadsheet a 30 year old PC will work as well as a new one. Or do text based browsing or searches on the internet, provided you can connect it somehow.

 

But no amount of wishful thinking will let you do the kind of graphics stuff that we do with AM on an Apple II.

[robcat2075]

I had a Commodore 64 in 1983 which had the same processor as an Apple II.

 

I read an article that explained the math of projecting 3D shapes onto a flat screen and wrote a BASIC program to do that but it was seriously tedious stuff to enter all the coordinates for the line segments and all that. I didn't get much 3D modeling done that way.

 

But somehow that's how they did TRON. All the CG was done with typed commands and data on punch cards. Ouch.

[Roger]

I had a Commodore 64 in 1983 which had the same processor as an Apple II.

 

I read an article that explained the math of projecting 3D shapes onto a flat screen and wrote a BASIC program to do that but it was seriously tedious stuff to enter all the coordinates for the line segments and all that. I didn't get much 3D modeling done that way.

 

But somehow that's how they did TRON. All the CG was done with typed commands and data on punch cards. Ouch.

 

 

Yeah, I don't even want to think about. Povray with a text editor was bad enough. I never got beyond primitives or the obligatory chrome sphere over a checkerboard.

What it amounts to, is you are manually generating the text file to describe the scene, whereas in AM you are using a graphical interface. But they both (I believe) pass some sort of simple text file to the renderer with the commands telling it what goes where and what to do.

 

You could do some pretty fancy stuff with Povray by plotting out everything on graph paper before hand, building each component separately with the text description language, and then putting it all together in the renderer at the end to generate a single object. There was a guy way back (name escapes me at the moment) that did some pretty amazing stuff with just Povray using that technique.

 

You can imagine this would be beyond tedious for more than a few objects, and animation probably impossible other than simple path animation.

I don't want to think about throwing punch cards into the mix, that sounds like an enormous pain. Were they really stuck using punch cards for Tron? I know they had some super-duper tricked out PDP-11 that they used, but I thought they had some sort of primitive hard disk (or at least tape) by then.

[robcat2075]

Me posting on another forum about 6 years ago...

 

I once went to a presentation by Chris Wedge (Blue Sky) at the World Animation Celebration (about 1999). He talked about how at that time (TRON era) there really was no GUI for that stuff as we know it today.

 

He said the modeling and animation was done by typing in data and code on punchcards and tossing them into the card reader and waiting to see what came out.

 

 

That's my memory of what he said. It seemed that punch cards were the format of choice for their project data but I'm just guessing that there must have been tape involved to store the output image data.

[Roger]

Well I would definitely take the word of the guy that actually did it. There must have been some reason punch cards were attractive over magnetic storage. I don't remember the exact year Tron was made, I think it was 1981 or 1982? Actually it was released in the early 80s so it was probably in production in the late 70s. So I guess it is possible that magnetic storage was just prohibitively expensive, or that system could only accept punch card input. Still, yikes. Would not want to have to model/animate like that.

[robcat2075]

I would guess that typing single lines on punch cards probably offered about as much editing flexibility as any on-screen text editor that might have been on an all electronic system back then.

 

I don't know. I took a programming class about 1980 or so and we were typing our programs on punch cards and submitting them to a clerk who would run them for us so that was major university level technology back then.

 

didn't learn much in that class. Getting a C-64 with its interpreted BASIC was light years better than anything I had access to in college.

[robcat2075]

It is possible that Chris Wedge was doing the "why, when i was a boy we had to walk through five miles of snow every morning just to get to the punch card machine... and we liked it!" routine when i heard him speak.

[Roger]

In keeping with discussing old PCs, I thought this might bring a few chuckles:

 

http://www.wired.com/2014/05/gta-commodore/