Ars Technica has published part four in their series on the history of the Amiga, starting with Amiga being bought by Commodore. "One hugely positive benefit about being owned by a large computer company was that the Amiga team no longer (for the moment, anyway) had to worry about money. The team was moved 10 miles to a spacious, rented facility in Los Gatos, California. They could afford to hire more engineers, and the software development team went from having 10 people sharing a single Sage workstation to everyone having their own SUN on their desk."
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Member since:2007-04-23
PEEKs and POKEs were indeed awful, and it didn't help that characters had a different code when POKEd on the screen than the ASCII code used in strings, nor did the lack of colour attributes for individual pixels on the C64 help.
I did some graphics on the PET and later a bit on the C64 (I never owned any of them, though), but most of my early graphics programming was on my own BBC Micro, which I bought around 1982 IIRC. The BBC micro had a vastly superior BASIC to the Commodores, including real graphics commands (points, lines, filled triangles, flood fills and more) and structured programming (repeat and while loops, multi-line if-then-else and recursive procedures and functions with named parameters), so programming was a joy compared to the C64. And with separate colour attributes for each pixel, colour graphics were a lot easier.
I agree with the original poster that getting into graphics programming is more difficult now than it was then. When you started your home computer, you were directly brought into an interactive BASIC environment and could start typing, editing and running programs, and a graphics environment was easily initialized (on the BBC, you just wrote "mode 0" to get a 640x256 b/w screen, "mode 1" to get a 320x256 4-colour screen and "mode 2" to get a 160x256 8-colour screen). In most PC programming languages you need to include a graphics library and call an initialisation function with zillions of arcane parameters, and if you want to plot text, you have to first load fonts and then specify half a zillion parameters to the text-plot functions. Sure, all these parameters allow flexibility, but they also raise the entry barrier.
Member since:2006-09-21
I have to agree that programming was a lot easier back then. There were a bunch of reasons for that:
You had more accessible languages to learn with. In BASIC, you can write one line of code and have a working program. In C, the smallest properly written program is four lines and those four lines introduce three concepts instead of one. Then there is the edit-compile cycle, which you didn't have to deal with in BASIC.
There was less confusion as to where to start. Almost every personal computer had BASIC, even IBM branded IBM PCs. There also seemed to be less of a stigma over proper languages and proper programming technique. Sure that combination produced a lot of bad programmers and bad programs, but it also got a lot of us into programming.
"Open source" (or maybe visible source is a better name) was arguably more common back then than it is today. If you download free (as in beer) software for Windows, you probably will never have the opportunity to see the source code. Even if you download free (as in freedom) software you will probably never download the source code. If you never have the source code stuck in front of you, you lose a great opportunity to learn from other people. But back then a lot of little programs were programmed in BASIC so you did have the source code. In other cases, you didn't only have the source code in front of you -- but you had to type it in! (Remember Compute's Gazette, the magazine and their books?)
There were also a tonne of books for new programmers, and they were not intimidatingly thick. Many were even geared toward kids and young teens. Sure such books still exist today, but when I go to the computer programming section, it is tiny and it is dominated by specialist books rather than introductory programming books (e.g. how to program python). Of course the majority of computer books are just how-to books for using software, rather than how-to books for programming, which demonstrates where people's interests lay.
Finally, expectations were lower. If I wanted to create a game today, one that is played by normal people, it would need great graphics, great sound, and be sophisticated enough to draw people in. If I wanted to create something less creative today, like a utility or application, my program would be compared to the many commercial, independent, and open source applications out there. All of which would be more sophisticated that what I could make in a reasonable time. But it wasn't like that in the 1980s. Back then I could make a program and show it off to my friends, only to have them go "ooh" and "ahh". And showing off is a great little incentive to acquire and improve your programming skills.
Edit, for clarity (too early). Added comments on books.
Edited 2007-10-24 12:53
Member since:
2005-07-06
Not really. In many respects, programming is far easier today than it was then. Especially graphics programming! Those GETs and PUTs and POKEs and PEEKs were awful. Now you just have to read a book carefully, and it explains the structures with great examples. Since the structures have meaningful names, as opposed to random addresses in memory (or seemingly random), it's much easier to move off and do your own thing.