The TI 34010

From: Derek Peschel <dpeschel_at_u.washington.edu>
Date: Tue Mar 2 15:59:06 1999

> > my ideasx: easy programmability and flexible memory architecture are good.
> > Comprehensive text routines are as important as graphics routines. If
>
> Block move/insert/combine is the really useful primative. You can use
> that to insert character bitmaps from a font elsewhere in RAM, for example.

Actually I was thinking of text effects like bold, italics, underline, etc.
Also I had character-cell displays in mind, as well as bit-addressable ones.

I'll admit that what I really had in the back of my mind, as a somewhat-good
but mostly-bad example, was PC graphics. I find their history oddly
haunting. There have been a lot of fancy features over the years. I'm most
interested in the EGA/VGA/custom extensions to text mode (more colors, big
character sets, large numbers of characters, etc.) but the graphics
extensions (3D cards, 8514/A, XGA, PGA, etc.) are nice too.

Unfortunately, they're built on top of such a lousy base! Bad BIOS code,
deficient hardware, a series of OSs that have no interface to _extra_
features (except maybe OS/2 and Linux), bad drivers... Admittedly, I always
wanted to play with a Hercules card.

-- Derek
Received on Tue Mar 02 1999 - 15:59:06 GMT