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blendo | 3 months ago

Back in the 80s, the Tek 4115 (color, 1280x1024) was so much fun for a young programmer working at RADC/Hanscom AFB.

Mandelbrot sets and Towers of Hanoi were so exciting to write in Fortran (I think Fortran 77), running under, iirc, CP/M.

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andrehacker|3 months ago

Great memories, I worked for a CAD/CAM company at the time.. as an intern. One of the problems they had was that they did not want to ship demoes of their system to certain countries as they had seen code be reverse engineered and stolen. I made a demo suite that allowed for 3D renders to be played back in vector mode from the internal 4115 memory. The feedback we got from the main office in England was not good: the demo made it seem that the system was capable of creating real-time rotation views of complex models. Well, yes, it took several days to compute all frames but once I had the vectors the 4115 could show the frames at incredible speed.

They flew me to headquarters to explain how I got that to work and potentially incorporate a demo module into the system. Company went sideways after that, I ended up in Cambridge at another startup in a similar but different space, they used Sun Workstations ! Good days.