The pun about "Area 5150" is int includes "area 51" (a US military base where, besides new weapons testing, according to conspiracy theories, aliens may also be investigated or kept - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_51) and "IBM 5150" combined.
The pun about "8088 MPH" is the "Intel 8088" was used an "MPH" obviously stands for "miles per hour", a rather fast pace.
In some sense, the audience for these demos is small, because to be truly appreciative of the technical skill of the demo coders, you probably should have programmed the IBM PC (and its various graphics modes) in assembler.
88 MPH is a Back to the Future reference. "When this baby hits 88mph, you're gonna see some serious shit!" And there's a Delorean in the "we don't need sprites" section.
> The pun about "8088 MPH" is the "Intel 8088" was used an "MPH" obviously stands for "miles per hour", a rather fast pace.
It’s also a Back To The Future (1985) reference! (The Delorean had to reach 88mph in order to time travel.) It captures the “new demo for a 1980s computer” situation on several levels.
It's sad that they got rid of the enhanced timekeeping functionality in the move from 5100 to the (as I understand it, inferior) IBM 5150 model, which ships chrono-locked from factory to the present time at all times. Bummer!
More precisely it refers to the California Welfare and Institutions Code, Section 5150[1], regarding the procedures for involuntary psychiatric holds. I doubt IBM was aware of the connection at the time, but it's definitely fitting. :D
You wonder how much better computing would be for any generation of CPU and display technology if people just spent the time and effort squeezing out every last drop of performance? How much energy and resources are we wasting because few people are programming or understanding their computers at the lowest level?
We can gain some insight by looking to the past. Certain generations of CPU were considerably longer lived than others. Think back to the 6502, Z80, 68000, or even the 8088. Even though the pace of progress was crazy back then, some of those CPUs were long lived because they formed the basis of budget computers. Some found a second life in other types of devices.
While software improved, it never seemed as dramatic for applications than it did for games and never as dramatic for games as it was for demos. Applications were bumping into hard limits with respect to both computational power and memory. It frequently meant that one had to purchase an expensive workstation simply to get work done. Our computers may feel slow at times, but they can usually do what we expect of them without the expense of specialized hardware.
Why are demos the exception? Part of it will have to do with maintainability and support. No one is going to worry about updates to a demo a year down the road, never mind ten years. Likewise, no one is going to care if it fails to run on some computers due to some obscure edge case. Demos can also afford to make trade-offs. Few, if any, demos require user interaction. They don't have to concern themselves with background processes. From start to end, they are deterministic. Things that would be truly bizarre in application development, such as tying up the CPU to get precise timing to play tricks with the video card then using deterministic code paths to get that precise timing, are acceptable with demos.
Made fairly famous by Van Halen, who used it as both an album name and the name for his signature guitar amplifier (still in production, and very, very popular to this day).
Lots of very same tricks that were used on 8bit computers - changing screen border offsets per scanline to generate smooth sinus-scroll like effects without moving any pixels in the memory, altering color palettes mid-refresh, faking graphics with fonts and animation with palette shifting - all prime tools in the 1980s. Masterpiece, no doubt. I'd be so cool to see the source!
It's a fixed 16 color palette. On most 8 bit machines a lot of these effects were actually easier, because their "GPUs" were more powerful, or rather, tailored towards making games, while the IBM PC, or more specifically the CGA, was very dumb and limited.
Those CGA textmode graphics modes are fun. I once wrote a fractal zoomer that worked at 160x100 16c or 80x100 ... many colours, depending on which dither characters I used.
Glad to see someone driving the technique to the extreme!
The pun about "8088 MPH" is the "Intel 8088" was used an "MPH" obviously stands for "miles per hour", a rather fast pace.
In some sense, the audience for these demos is small, because to be truly appreciative of the technical skill of the demo coders, you probably should have programmed the IBM PC (and its various graphics modes) in assembler.