Avian’s Blog

I came across this pile of ring-bound printouts while cleaning my bedroom yesterday.

This used to be my precious printed library of documents I downloaded from BBSes and early web sites via agonizingly slow and unreliable modem connections.

I was fascinated by computer graphics then, trying to write my own 3D engine. Around that time my dad replaced a monochrome Hercules with a VGA graphics card and an old Compaq color monitor (RGB #000000 was displayed as dark green on it). Shareware version of Doom just barely ran on the AMD 386DX with the viewscreen set to minimum size.

On the left there's a VGA Trainer Program by Denthor of Asphyxia (a really wonderful set of tutorials that got me hooked on the topic after the first page). On the right is Speedy free direction texture mapping and other nifty tricks by Hekan "Zap" Andersson (in its full 9-pin dot-matrix glory).

Scary. Today it's faster and easier to retrieve a document like that from a server in Australia using a search engine in North America than to open a paper folder one meter away.