Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

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My first computer was an old PC XT, ancient even by the undemanding standards of 1995, but cost under 100 USD - which counted a lot in early post-Communist Central Europe with average wage in the 250 USD territory.

I did a lot of Turbo Pascaling on that one, but it was frustrating watching the compiler go so slooowly while I already noticed a misprint or a missing ; on the screen.

The last thing I did on Turbo Pascal was a program that drew fractals in 320x200 using direct memory access (byte absolute). I tried to get it working in 640x480, but the differences between individual VGA cards were too big. That was 386 already, though.

It was so easy to draw simple graphics in pascal, right?

I have this snippet burned in my head and I used it all the time in MS-DOS' on Turbo Pascal 6 or 7 to get to the tasty 320x200 palleted graphics mode:

    asm
      mov ax,13h
      int 10h
    end

iirc, after that you could simply directly access video memory using something like "mem[$A000:x+200*y] = color;" and that was it.

Fun times.

> but the differences between individual VGA cards were too big.

Buyed the programming manual for the ET4000 GPU (>100DM for this manual alone, a lot for a student from the eastern part of Germany at this time), opcodes and all. I liked the possibility to easily mix Assembler with Pascal in Turbo Pascal. Machine code for graphics, FPU, interrupt programming, the higher language for anything else.

After that, I learned C from the Open Source Fractint. So, the transition wasn't that painful after TP's decline.

And anything was so snappy in Turbo Pascals text mode windowing system (as with Norton Commander too).

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