Skip to main content
Retrocomputing

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

11
  • 12
    There is nothing special about having a second CPU handling drawing to relax constrains on the main CPU. Has been done many times. All the way form secondary Z80 to dedicated GPUs. Not to mention hardware support for graphics primitives like line and area drawing or bit-blitting. Windows 3.x/95 could gain quite speed from graphics cards doing primitives on their own.
    – Raffzahn
    Commented Mar 27, 2021 at 11:07
  • 2
    @Raffzahn It is not that using a second processing unit dedecated to graphics was surprising, but RAM was more expensive than CPU in early 80s, thus you have to store the window in some kind of graph description languages and draw them not per frame (there is no room for the rendered raster), but per scanline.
    – Schezuk
    Commented Mar 27, 2021 at 11:24
  • 8
    @Schezuk Not really sure what you want to say, but RAM in sizes used for screens wasn't overly expensive, as screen resolution was rather low back then. A high end workstation in 1980 ( >20 kUSD price tag) had a resolution of 1024x768 (at maximum) in B/W. which fits into 96 KiB of RAM - that's 48 4116 chips at ca. 3 USD (in 1980), so less than 150 USD, or less than a percent of the System price. A high res colour screen of an upper end graphics workstation at that time would be like 512x384x16 which again fits into the same amount of money. It's easy to overestimate capabilities from back then
    – Raffzahn
    Commented Mar 27, 2021 at 11:43
  • 5
    @Schezuk 320x200 is less than 32 KiB. That's less than 20 USD in 1984 when the Tandy was introduced. More important here, the question was about systems with 'intelligent' graphics controllers, right? That is nothing to be found in cheap systems like a Tandy would have. That's something only added to high end workstations, not home computers.
    – Raffzahn
    Commented Mar 27, 2021 at 12:09
  • 2
    GUIs were already a thing in the early eighties (Apple Lisa, Xerox Star...), hardware accelerated or not.
    – rackandboneman
    Commented Mar 29, 2021 at 8:48