'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)

[Derek D. Martin]

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At some point hitherto, Rich Cloutier hath spake thusly:
> > think the largest influence was by far had by the gaming industry.
> 
> ...and I have to disagree to some extent with that.
> 
> While the gaming industry has forced hardware manufacturers to push the
> limit on 3d rendering and animation speeds, which translate into fast GPUs,
> and hardware acceleration, it is the GUI environment (Windows) that has
> pushed for acres of screen real estate, ie., 1600x1280 desktops, multiple
> monitors, and so forth.

I still have to disagree with this.  It was the gaming industry that
pushed the early PC graphics adaptors from CGA to EGA and then to VGA,
with the desire for ever sharper and more colorful game details.  It
was the gaming industry that created a demand for sound cards with
respectable digital sound effects and music synthesis at commodity
prices.  It was the advent of first-person shooter games, like Castle
Wolfenstien in 1992 and Doom in 1993, that pushed those resolutions to
be fed faster, and then with other games to go further to 1024x768 for
still crisper graphics with the advent of such games as Quake I in
1996.  At that point, I believe the majority of non-gaming Windows
users were still using Windows at 640x480 at 256 colors or less... 

At the time, I was working at UPS in field support, and we'd only just
started to switch people from our DOS-based shipping program to a
Windows one.  I installed this product on shipping systems for a fair
number of our customers, and the systems almost always ran at
640x480x256. Many businesses were still primarily using DOS-based
applications at that time, and were only just beginning to switch to
Windows.  Graphics cards of the time which were able to do higher
resolutions were comparitively expensive.

Even today, if you walk around the office where you work, I suspect
that you'll find a majority of users still use a desktop size of
1024x768.  This has been the case everywhere I've worked, period.
Some users actually still used 800x600, because of eye strain issues.

For the most part, high-res desktops are still to this day relegated
to Geeks Like Us (TM), or to those with specialized needs (i.e. CAD
designers, publishers, and similar).  Were it not for the gaming
industry, decent sound hardware would probably still be substantially
more expensive, being relegated to musicians, sound effects people,
and other similar special needs groups.

> And it is the fact that we do not really have a true Real Time Operating
> System that has caused massive increases in CPU horsepower, disk speeds, and
> gobs of RAM in order to play back audio and video files without skipping,
> making it SEEM like we have real time capabilities, when in fact we do not.

Use DOS.  It might not be a truly real time OS; but since it doesn't
multitask, close enough.

The reason CPU power has increased so quickly is again, because of the
gaming industry.  If this were not true, why did processors on other
platforms (Unix systems, for example) which do not typically play
games grow so slowly by comparison?  Only fairly recently, after
realizing that PCs had gotten so powerful as to be able to outperform
their expensive hardware have Unix vendors' CPUs started to catch up
to PC CPUs.

It's all about the games baby!  =8^)

- -- 
Derek Martin               ddm at pizzashack.org    
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