🚀 go-pugleaf

On Thu, 18 Apr 1996 whome@eatme.com emailed me from an unknown host:
> 320x200 16 colors 8mhx pleasurable???? GET REAL. remember most people didnt go 
> out and buy a Falcon, most people already jumped ship before then.So most STer 
> ar stuck with the old 8mhz. What is pleasurable in this. Most PC video cards 

Most people didn't buy a Falcon because few stores stocked it, there was 
little advertising, and it was underpowered and overpriced for the 
functions it was intended to do. Those are all Atari's "cheapest you can 
get it" approach to creating/selling hardware. 

8 Mhz isn't pleasurable for me (that is why I upgraded), however the
plethora of accelerator cards for it shows just how good the design was.
How many accelerators can you get for your PC?

> dont even go down below 640x480 and 256 colors at a minumum because they all 
> see lower as a TOTAL JOKE. I have mor memory in my video car , 8 megs , than 
> most sters in their systems.    Its almost the 21st century and you are on 

And how much of that 8 Mbytes in your video is used? As a single screen
you would be able to have (at 256 colours) a screen larger than most
current monitors can display. 640x480x256 only uses 300k (307200 bytes)
for one contiguous image. Going to 24-bit colour ups this to 900k
(921600), or even 32-bit (which is really 24-bit colour with an extraneous
byte added to speed up [ha!] processing), this will only go to 1200k
(1228800). So where is the other 6984k of video ram used? 

That smacks of "more money than common sense", or the PC-worlds "my stats
are better than your stats" childish phallus comparisons. 

> technology that really hasnt changed since first conceived in 1979-80

1979 was the conception date of the Atari 8-bit. 

THE ST was conceived in 1985. It owed nothing to the 8-bit, as it was a
"fresh from day one" design. 

I own a TT, conceived around 1990. I am rarely in a screen mode lower than
640*480*16. My physical RAM is not limited to the 640k of "conventional" 
RAM, and 8 or 16 Mbytes of Extended. I have 4Megs of 16-bit RAM, and 16 
Mbytes of 32-bit RAM - both of which are expandable (in my case to 10 and 
128 Mbytes respectively).

The PC architecture was conceived around 1980, (for the September 1981
release of IBM's original "home computer" PC). Little has changed since
then - video is still card based, rather than using (possibly separate)
motherboard ram. 

PCers rarely use lower because they have been brainwashed that lesser
colours are (ugh!) primitive, nasty and (sometimes) not even available. 

Most just plug-in and go with whatever setup the machine was in when
shipped to them, and remain blissfully ignorant of anything else the 
hardware is capable of. 

Lesser colours onscreen will give faster video performance, smaller video
RAM requirements, and cheaper video hardware. 

Few users _need_ 256 or more colours. 

Graphic artists, photo-retouchers, and other colour-intensive occupations
are about the only areas where high colour counts are required. 

The most common use of computers is for word processing. This is one area
where large numbers of colours are a waste of time and money. 

If you are wordprocessing, how many colours do you need? Black and white
for the "page" and text upon it, perhaps red for typographical marks
(errors, for example), perhaps blue for page layouts (margins, page
breaks), and maybe one more colour for highlights or some other WP
feature. That is five colours in total. Where would you suggest the other
251 (of the 256 available) colours be used? 

A PC as a home computer (read "games box") is overkill. Why spend
thousands on an obsolete-before-you-buy-it PC when, for one tenth the
price, you can buy a console? 

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