🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi!  
Old computer story: Programming now in X-windows & PHIGS on speedy workstations
I still remember a good use, we made of the famous C64 in early '80. 
That was in Poland, during the martial law and Solidarity crash. There was a
strictly unoffitial "Publishing house", copying political movies on VHS. 
Copies come mostly from the West, but we had to create additional screens with
information before and after the movie. The C64 was a beautiful tool to do 
this! 2kB of assembly code - which switched off BASIC as one of a very first 
of its instructions - and another 2 kB of images of huge, Polish characters
- not supported by any ASCII standards, btw.- created pictures on the screen,
which were better that "regular" TV at that time! Moving images, texts, which
disapeared in random "fog" to become other texts in a while - all that with 
the small Commodore. The beast has 4 available video buffers, creating other
when displaying one was the common method. Also 64 kB of memory is available
- however I never was so brave to switch off the Kernal - it REALLY is a 64
kB of fresh, read/write RAM. I even created a small "compiler" for creating
different screens - it recognized about 20 3-leters commands with parameters,
and allowed Basic-style editing. (First I started with pure binary code). 
I would wish myself to have enough heart now to produce such a program for
a 16-MB Unix workstation - optimizing every 10 bytes to produce 8 bytes. 
Or to produce 1kB-long game for something, what has 16kB and was a precursor
of "Spectrum" (Z-81 ???) - my friend did it, and I've seen a similar game 
(Lode Runner) on an IBM XT, using hundreds of kbytes. 
Small is beautifull...                                       Antek

Antek @ Bioch.Tamu.Edu,   Bitnet: Antek @ Tambigrf   I don't need disclaimers.