I find all the videos like comfort food, times might be really bad for me at the moment but im super grateful these relaxing, informative computer chronicles are here anytime i just want to forgot about life for an hour or two.
These days, youtubers are essentially filling the roll that shows like this held before we had the internet. You just need to find the ones who offer well-researched, accurate information with good presentation. There is some bad content out there, but there's still a lot of good, informative content too.
@@ConsciousRobot I try hard to find info and videos of driving simulator history (I made a big playlist here), but videos are barely tagged about this topic, so unless some future AI will do that, it is still very hard to find footage about specialized topics.
80's tv was pretty lown, almost relaxing, nowadays it's all about a loud audience, flashy lights, anoyance, mostly to keep people interested because they could lose focus quickly, like everyone suffers of Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
The later episodes were different to me, the earlier ones seemed to spend more time and focus on the tech and concepts. The later ones seemed like more and more tech companies trying to compete and push their products on the show, even if they were crap.
neoasura Well, you can hardly blame them. Especially starting around the mid-90s with Commodore and Digital Research dead and Atari Corp. trying their hands at a home console (the MISERABLE Jaguar. Why they didn't just make a console based on the Falcon computer is beyond me), the concepts were essentially universal now that everything was IBM and people were more used to having a computer in the home, and they probably didn't wanna drag down longtime viewers with redundant information. Really, talking about the new accessories and tech releases was a much safer bet.
probably much less compared to google. I mean seriously google pays better and you have it more comfortable, no thirll, no uniforms and no bad cantine food. And why hide a technology when seeling it or providing a service with it is much more useful. This isn't communism. So if they have anythign behind close doors I expect it to be really buggy!. But a glimmer for something really amazing I am sure. So right on!.
@@unnamedchannel1237 wrong. the existence of phenomena like the hall effect that cannot be simulated computationally disproves the notion that reality is a simulation
If even. That simulation is primitive enough that you might actually have to work harder to find/build assets for a recreation than if you just dumped some free assets into a map
The version of Flight Simulator they are playing is the first Flight Sim I played on my 64. I have owned every Microsoft Flight Sim since. Great memories.
the newer one uses google maps so you can fly over your home and see your car and if you were lucky enough to be out there when the sat took the pic see yourself to
Don't confuse the Singer-Link simulators run on a main-frame computer with shrink wrapped flight simulator software run on a PC. In the early 70's I worked for Xerox Data Systems (XDS) as a Field Engineer in Rochester, New York. XDS bought out Scientific Data Systems (SDS) in 1969. I went to Singer-Links Binghamton, New York facility once (1971?) to fix a Mag Tape problem our on-site guy was having trouble with. I believe the computers Singer-Link used were XDS System 7's. The simulators I saw included the cockpit and a portion of the fuselage. It had hydraulic lifts positioned underneath so that pitch, roll, and yaw could be controlled. The graphics were displayed on a large screen in front of the cockpit. Blackout curtains were employed so that pilots could practice instrument only. A System 7 had an internal IO processor to handle a multitude of peripheral devices including General purpose IO to control vendor specific devices.. A 1983 PC could run VisiCalc and WordPerfect.
@@johnhein5089 no mate what I meant was they had simulations that advanced that early? granted maybe it probably consisted of and relied on the supercomputers of the time but I didn't know computing went that far back or that they had that much power before the 80s either
See Wikipedia Scientific Data Systems for a lost of customers and appliczions. They weren't "Super-computers" and wouldn't be called "mian-frames" until the advent of mini-computers. Other than Sigma 9 I seem to remember that 128kB was max memory size. Ferrite Core memory was used.
That simulator at 2:10 was quite advanced looking for 1983, polygons, shading, textures and smooth framerate..looks like Nintendo 64 which came out years later.
@@gundamzerostrike have you even watched the video? First one was a game for PC-s with one chip, while the second one renders 8000 edges in real time, with 30 fps, and has 40 000 chips inside, and it was being used for military flight simulations
@@raven4k998 The GPUs of that time weren't really GPUs, they didn't process anything in terms of computation. These were passive graphics chips in whose graphics memory the CPU pushed the pixels and the graphics chip then only displayed them on the screen. The graphics chip didn't calculate anything at all. Graphic chips that can calculate 3d calculations themselves came a short time later on special computer hardware in the high-end computing sector. For consumer PCs, however, it took until around 1996, when the Voodoo Graphics accelerator card appeared at the end of the year and it was only a fixed pipeline graphics chip and thus not very flexible. The first mass-produced GPU that was programmable to some degree was the GeForce 256, released in 1999.
The military industrial complex has massive budgets. That helicopter simulation was at least a decade ahead of what ordinary folks could run at home, and would have seemed like a distant dream to viewers. It’s interesting how pretty much all the key technologies in use today wouldn’t have progressed, or even existed, without the military requirements pushing progress on. Everything from microelectronics to GPS (original purpose was for submarines to quickly determine where they are before annihilating a few million people). And of course the internet itself. Nope I’m not passing any moral judgement, but few people appreciate this stuff.
Those graphics are at least 15-16 years ahead of their time. The first commerical PC graphics that had comparable graphics was U.S Navy Fighters, released in 95.
One of the first PC games with texturing was F-15 Strike Eagle 3 and was released in the end of 1992. However, Gouraud shading that can be seen in this military sim too was still missing. One of the first games i know of that did combine Gouraud shading and texturing on the PC was Strike Commander. Strike Commander was released in April 1993. So 2 years before the game you mentioned. It might look different on the resolution side. Strike Commander only had a resolution of 320 by 240 pixels. But what resolution this military simulation has is not recognizable. It doesn't look like the resolution is significantly higher.
@@OpenGL4ever The Daimler-Benz-Fahrsimulator (driving simulator of 1984, cost 25 million DM/Deutsche Mark) based on Evans & Sutherland/Gould computer had 6 projectors with each 512*512 pixel@50fps interlaced (256 colours, 1024 brightnesses) to get an idea what these machines were capable. th-cam.com/users/clipUgkxtUgG7Wtzo-n5ycxkcxrS4pHInRur5nle
That military simulation was in 1983?! Wow, that looked incredible. We didn't start seeing 3 dimensional games like that until late 4th generation, early 5th (1995).
I flew in helicopter simulators many many times during my Army career. I was an H60 pilot from 2008 to 2013, before I got hurt. The Sims were wonderful for IMD training and process oriented items but they were near impossible to maintain a hover. The graphics left a lot to be desired as depth perception is concerned. I can imagine how terrible those things would have been 25 years prior but it's still impressive.
As of today, you can no longer simulate a 747 crashing into a skyscraper. This feature was removed from the Flight Simulator series after 9/11. It was partially simulated in previous versions. So the decade of the sim matters if you want to try this out of curiosity.
@@OpenGL4ever Ist there still 9-11 hystery, really? AFAIK many "serious" flight simulators just don't show explosions but display a text "accident" and end the flight. Nobody really cares about that. I rather worry that cloud based online sims inform national intelligence when you try to crash into buildings or people with a plane or vehicle (which likely causes thousands of false alarms since every kid tries to do that).
3:01 you know this animation with the wireframed buildings would still look amazing today. It is really stylistic in it's presence. Of course today this would be more awesome if it was procedural generated. So here is a little practice you can do, maybe I should do it, sounds fun!.
11:40 Wow, for a few million dollars and probably a few hundred K a year in maintenance and power bill, you could have had a gaming system as powerful as an N64 with an incomplete version of Pilot Wings 64 in 1983! ;)
I had a Tandy TRS-80 back then, the military's flight sim really is quite amazing for the time even for a supercomputer. This is when Commodore 64's were the best gaming computers around.
I guess, any computer program of this time would amaze them. Ok, any, but not Windows 10, Gary would have set: I have already written this GEM clone for the Atari ST :D
@@acmenipponair Gary would be quite impressed with the Windows taskbar at first glance and with a closer look at the NTFS file system and other internal systems. But in 1983 there was no computer that could run a Windows NT based system, it needed at least a 32-bit processor and protected mode. However, the 386 was not introduced until 1985.
If in 1983 the military has had this kind of hardware and software compared to the arcade games we were playing like Pac-Man and similar, I just could wonder now what kind of simulations they have in 2021, I'm not talking about ARMA 3 or MS Flight simulator, they are just games for common people.
Today most of the processing power is going into better simulation aspects of weapon systems and weapon effects and the distance of the simulated world. The latter uses the computing power at least by a factor of x² as the simulated distance increases. In a normal computer game, the game world can be large, but the space in which the game world is actively simulated is extremely small. This has the usual effect that, for example, enemies at long range do not react at all or only react very slowly when you shoot at them. And the effects of weapons have a significantly lower effectiveness with increasing distance than it is the case in reality. In a game you simply increase the spread of the weapon so that it hits much worse at longer ranges. This forces the player to shoot at the enemy at close range. But in a military simulation, of course, you want the weapon to behave exactly as it does in real life. Thus you will have to increase the simulated bubble in which everything reacts. And that's where all the processing power is going today.
Many professional simulators nowadays look much more primitive than newest game consoles (see my driving simulator history playlist). Possibly this is to guarantee low latency (for reaction test research etc.), but I guess most games now have so much graphics details that it would be to expensive labour for a small science company to add such features. NVidia seems to have cutting-edge graphics in their CARLA simulator, but other pro stuff mostly looks like games from 10 to 20 years ago.
I have played simulator based video games on my Pentium PC in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. I know about the CAD programs which were early drafting tools that were used by architectural firms. Simulator software can be used by either architects to design buildings or drivers education classes to teach people to drive or novice golfers to learn how to swing a golf club for greater accuracy or animators for 3-D effects in movies and on TV or playing more advanced video games.
Strike Commander had similar graphics and was released in 1993. You can assume, that the clock rate of these 40000 chips was very low and synching them all did cost CPU power too.
@@OpenGL4ever These were vector computers (SIMD) and the many chips (mostly TTL) rather acted like cells in a modern GPU, likely executing everything synchronously. (Simulators by Evans & Sutherland, often Gould supercomputers).
Wow, what computer was it that had 40k processors? And what processors were they - 8088's / Z80s? I thought this kind of supercomputing wasn't possible with run of the mill desktop chips back then. Wouldn't this massive cluster setup have given the Cray a run for the money? Yes, folks, this COULD have run Crysis... in 1983!
They are talking about CHIPS. Not Processors. CHIPS can mean just 40k of TTL logic chips... and that would be like a processor with 40k transistors. Not more.
No you cant just look at the computing power. To Run Crysis you need Direct x 9 and some modern instructions that simply did not exist back then. Maybe some supercomputing in the 90er has theoretically enough computing power for crysis but they still has a lack of modern instructions to run Crysis.
MegaUnwetter... you just talk about SOFTWARE. And there your mistake comes from: Yes, Crysis wouldn't run natively on the Cray. But you could reprogram it so that it would run, because a modern GPU is nothing but a superscalar parallel vector computer... And so Crysis could run. Very slow, because instead of 600 or 1200 or whatever cores you would only have one Cray I core to do the vector calculations :D
And when it comes to instructions, you are also wrong. A processor don't need to know many instructions. Only plus, minus, mul, div, some condition testing and jump routines. Everything else can be programmed out of these simple instructions. In fact: MODERN CPUs only use these routines to work. A modern ARM processor as well as any AMD or Intel processor are in reality RISC-computers. They have natively only a small instruction set. The only difference is, that for example the Intel Core CPUs can be programmed in x64 and x86 mode, which means, your assembler code is really big and has many instructions... and when the CPU gets the instructions, it recompiles these instructions into the simple RISC code. So you as a programmer, even when you write time critical machine code, can write easily and the computer interprets your code on the fly. Unlike the 1980s he can do it super fast, so that you don't feel it anymore.
It's interesting hearing them talk about this stuff that was brand new at the time. Today it's commonplace and cheap. You can even download a state of the art game engine right now and make something yourself if you have the brains for it. The military only simulator Virtual Battle Space is based on the game ARMA.
assembly back then everything was in assembly or basic however basic was way to slow for stuff like that assembly was atleast 100 times faster then anything written in basic so for the super computer military app had to be assembly for the shear speed to achieve that kind of performance back then to even have a chance at that level of graphics
Over 20 years ago, I knew and worked with Loren Carpenter from Pixar and previously from Lucasfilm. He told me that he (co-?)wrote the software that rendered the animation of the Death Star.
Oops! I remembered that it was the Death Star animation in Return of the Jedi that he did. I looked it up, though, and Larry Cuba and some other CalArts students created the animation on "the JPL computer". motionographer.com/2008/03/31/larry-cuba-star-wars-computer-animation/ starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Death_Star_plans#Behind_the_scenes www.starwars.com/news/death-star-plans-are-in-the-main-computer-and-special-postcard
@@RetroDawn Did he also made the base star and cylon grid models of the computer software that is shown in the Battlestar Galactica TV-Series from the 80thies?
Comparing to X-plane 5 that launched in 1999, 16 years later, this military simulation still looks more appealing in some aspects. The physics calculations may be not as advanced but the visual side is subjectively nicer. And what’s even more impressive, XP5 didn’t run nearly as smooth even on top tier PCs of 1999/2000.
This shows the dominance of the IBM PC compatible at the time. Had they shown the Amiga it would have made the military simulation look like a child's drawing. Industry often causes progress latency.
If I could talk to a dead person (not family) I'd love to speak with Gary Kildall. Honestly came across so humble despite being a genius. So sad he passed so young.
DR-DOS 3.40 was my first operating system and it was from Digital Research, the company of Gary Kildall. In some aspects it was better than MS-DOS of that time.
Operation Flashpoint was much more advanced than this. OFP did make use of 3d acceleration videocards, thus it had much higher resolutions, mip mapping, texture filtering and other graphics effects. What you can see in the military sim in the video is basically Gouraud Shading combined with texturing and a low polygon count at a low resolution. Both Gouraud Shading and texturing at similar resolutions was available in 1993 on the PC in Strike Commander.
@@OpenGL4ever That Evans & Sutherland stuff (likely on Gould supercomputers) AFAIK had specialized antialiasing and colour grading hardware (possibly all analogue, like in synthesizers) that gave its low polygon rendering a special look. Gaming stuff with similar graphics typically had no antialiasing at all.
I would love to have a Time Machine and walk in the studio with a 13900k with a 3080ti running Microsoft Flight simulator and watch their facial reactions
I think Gary became bitter by the early 90s, with his rival Bill Gates scaling new heights. I feel bad for Gary because he was a such a good guy..only too idealistic...
Stew says the graphics of that military sim were "simplistic." Sorry, what the hell are you talking about? In 1983 those graphics were revolutionary. There wasn't a single arcade game or home computer that could even APPROACH something like that in 1983, we wouldn't see home graphics like that until around 1997 when 3DFX released their first graphics card. Those primitive flight sims chunking along at 1 frame per second are a joke compared to that military tech you showed.
oh nevermind, he said his computer had 40,000 cpu's in it. LMAO... i wrote this comment before i saw that terrible pc flight simulator they showed after the one with the 3d graphics.
@@ken-camo It likely had 40000 TTL chips (74LS etc.). Impressive simulators were typically by Evans & Sutherland, and the graphics supercomputer by Gould (cost many million $).
Sorry, you are falling on an urban legend. Gary Kindall wanted CP/M on the IBM PC. In fact, he even sued IBM so that they had to offer also the PC with CP/M. The reason that CP/M wasn't on the computers at the first place, was, that Gary Kindall was a typical silicon valley hippie computer geek. And when IBM wanted a "nondisclosure agreement" before any talks, he refused. That was not his mindset. CP/M later didn't became a hit for two reasons: First of all, Lotus 1-2-3 worked with MS/PC-DOS. And that was THE office suite of the 1980s. Second of all, IBM offered CP/M 86 for 250 dollar, meanwhile you could get MS-DOS for 29 dollars. So microsoft won.
What's more sad is the fact that he left us when this show is still a thing on the TV meaning he doesn't even got a chance to witness how advanced the new computer tech nowadays are. Bill Gates really are blessed with long lifespan while being one of the faces on this sector of technology.
@@acmenipponair In addition, MS-DOS from version 2.0 supported a hierarchical file system. MS-DOS 2.0 was released in March 1983. This made subfolders possible. CP/M did not support this. Digital Research later created DR-DOS to have a compatible operating system available.
@@adamantine001 I disagree. Gary Kildall died in July 1994, but Windows NT 3.1 was released in July 1993 and the still DOS based Windows 3.1 was already available to the masses. Thus with Windows NT it was clear, where the marked would move on. He lost with the success of Windows 3.0. Windows 3.0 was a system, he couldn't re-implement without getting into the trouble of possible violations.
Most realistic military simulator would have a cabin with built in explosives that would simulate the impact of the ground or of an enemy rocket should the trainee fail his mission. Just to keep them honest (and dead).
GPU power has become almost pointless. It's AI which will make difference when hooked to a supercomputer (or its equivalent) in cloud games, and I worry that it won't make the mankind better but only companies greedier and more effective to spy the people.
after watching this show .. its much older than i , "im in my 30's" this show has so many , mostly in the early years of the show .. "it like, use computer for war " constantly ... watch the AI epp ... it's like the show was use as cold war propaganda
I have a pocket full of quarters.... I AM THE GREATEST! Cook em Smash em Fry em Trash em Bake em Boil em Bite em Kick em Punch em Jab em Stab em ALL GONE BYE-BYE!
firewallsniper no they wouldnt as gta 5 is pretty primitive. they would be more impressed with games from the late 90's like falcon 4.0 which is much more impressive as a simulator. only thing close is something by dcs which is about the only hyper realistic sim maker along with the xplane guys
0:06 still I can do it faster than if u use an Calculator . Lets try this ( calculate from 1 to 100 (5500 on total)). I can do it faster use ( Chinese calculator 珠算器）.in fact ,no need to input if u (do Chinese calculator) faster or fast enough. It just changed math to (graphics ) 珠算其实是图形计算 不是数学计算 所以输入快 计算快，
And you would shit your pants if you'd see a Cray-2 (which already existed as a prototype in 1983) benchmarked vs. an ipad. Spoiler alert: same performance, with a very slight edge in favor of the Cray-2. They didn't have ANY performance issues 30 years ago, the price/performance ratio was the true bottleneck. Also with such primitive traffic AI like the one GTA5 has, you'd have been laughed out of the room. The simulation is what needs to be accurate and lifelike, not its visual presentation.
I find all the videos like comfort food, times might be really bad for me at the moment but im super grateful these relaxing, informative computer chronicles are here anytime i just want to forgot about life for an hour or two.
Hope it gets better.
@@kingofcapp appreciated that my friend. Have a great day.
I wish we still had informative shows like this.
Well thanks to YT you have shows like this again.
And nebula and others
These days, youtubers are essentially filling the roll that shows like this held before we had the internet. You just need to find the ones who offer well-researched, accurate information with good presentation. There is some bad content out there, but there's still a lot of good, informative content too.
@@ConsciousRobot I try hard to find info and videos of driving simulator history (I made a big playlist here), but videos are barely tagged about this topic, so unless some future AI will do that, it is still very hard to find footage about specialized topics.
It's called Linus Tech Tips, check it out!
It would take over a decade for graphics like those to make it to consumer hardware
80's tv was pretty lown, almost relaxing, nowadays it's all about a loud audience, flashy lights, anoyance, mostly to keep people interested because they could lose focus quickly, like everyone suffers of Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
Leonardo Antonio nice , they learn how to make tv xD
+沖縄札幌 To be fair, this was on PBS. They've never really been that loud.
This is how every Computer Chronicles episode was. They changed formats and got rid of the fake wood grain set later on but the content didn't change.
The later episodes were different to me, the earlier ones seemed to spend more time and focus on the tech and concepts. The later ones seemed like more and more tech companies trying to compete and push their products on the show, even if they were crap.
neoasura Well, you can hardly blame them. Especially starting around the mid-90s with Commodore and Digital Research dead and Atari Corp. trying their hands at a home console (the MISERABLE Jaguar. Why they didn't just make a console based on the Falcon computer is beyond me), the concepts were essentially universal now that everything was IBM and people were more used to having a computer in the home, and they probably didn't wanna drag down longtime viewers with redundant information. Really, talking about the new accessories and tech releases was a much safer bet.
These shows are so great.
That is very impressive for 1983.
meh that was nothing big 1993 was the big time to live with a computer man was it
@@raven4k998 what?
3:42 this simulation was 20 years ahead of its time, imagine what they have now behind closed doors
probably much less compared to google. I mean seriously google pays better and you have it more comfortable, no thirll, no uniforms and no bad cantine food. And why hide a technology when seeling it or providing a service with it is much more useful. This isn't communism.
So if they have anythign behind close doors I expect it to be really buggy!. But a glimmer for something really amazing I am sure. So right on!.
Ezydenias you really are horrifyingly naive.
@@ezydenias8505 Google blows it's always out of date besides video games makes google look like dog shit in comparison
The human race and all other animals and plants on earth are a simulation
@@unnamedchannel1237 wrong. the existence of phenomena like the hall effect that cannot be simulated computationally disproves the notion that reality is a simulation
Very impressive for 1983. It did take 40,000 chips, but still. Fun to look back.
imagine having that simulation on you computer of today you'd be like wow look at those graphics
yeah but, can it run crysis? :D .
I bet it can run doom.
@@chloedevereaux1801 nothing can run Crysis not even a RTX 4090ti can run Crysis faster then 60 fps kid
@@randywatson8347 your watch can run doom
I think this episode sealed the deal for me to get into technology back in those days.
are you sure?🤔
1983: 40,000 chips and an entire company of highly skilled experts
2022: Baby's first Unity project
Best comment on TH-cam
If even. That simulation is primitive enough that you might actually have to work harder to find/build assets for a recreation than if you just dumped some free assets into a map
I love how the early episodes were often so prophetic. It's not necessarily an earth shattering revelation but still really cool.
zero reliability I would expect nothing on the p[lane at all to work
The version of Flight Simulator they are playing is the first Flight Sim I played on my 64. I have owned every Microsoft Flight Sim since. Great memories.
the newer one uses google maps so you can fly over your home and see your car and if you were lucky enough to be out there when the sat took the pic see yourself to
6:52 "I'll just go into a stall here and crash so we can get going here." Not what you want to hear over the intercom on the plane.
That 1983 military simulation graphics wasn't available in PC games until like, 1995-1997.
and then computer games surpassed that simulation graphics wise server million time over since then
Strike Commander was released in 1993 and had both texturing and Gouraud Shading like this military sim does.
Don't confuse the Singer-Link simulators run on a main-frame computer with shrink wrapped flight simulator software run on a PC. In the early 70's I worked for Xerox Data Systems (XDS) as a Field Engineer in Rochester, New York. XDS bought out Scientific Data Systems (SDS) in 1969. I went to Singer-Links Binghamton, New York facility once (1971?) to fix a Mag Tape problem our on-site guy was having trouble with. I believe the computers Singer-Link used were XDS System 7's. The simulators I saw included the cockpit and a portion of the fuselage. It had hydraulic lifts positioned underneath so that pitch, roll, and yaw could be controlled. The graphics were displayed on a large screen in front of the cockpit. Blackout curtains were employed so that pilots could practice instrument only. A System 7 had an internal IO processor to handle a multitude of peripheral devices including General purpose IO to control vendor specific devices.. A 1983 PC could run VisiCalc and WordPerfect.
and this was in the 70s????
Yes, 50 yrs ago when I was but a lad.
@@johnhein5089 no mate what I meant was they had simulations that advanced that early? granted maybe it probably consisted of and relied on the supercomputers of the time but I didn't know computing went that far back or that they had that much power before the 80s either
See Wikipedia Scientific Data Systems for a lost of customers and appliczions. They weren't "Super-computers" and wouldn't be called "mian-frames" until the advent of mini-computers. Other than Sigma 9 I seem to remember that 128kB was max memory size. Ferrite Core memory was used.
What was the clock rate of the 40000 CPUs and how many where responsible for graphic rendering?
It's interesting seeing Stewart be the one to show off a piece of software
That simulator at 2:10 was quite advanced looking for 1983, polygons, shading, textures and smooth framerate..looks like Nintendo 64 which came out years later.
you've got a point
the 64 was released in 1996
Tron 1982 too had nice CGI
but Tron was pre-rendered. The simulation is rendering in real time at 30 FPS.
Looks like it, but costs like 5000 times more.
That military simulation... I've seen flash games that look worse than that and this is from 1983
@@gundamzerostrike have you even watched the video? First one was a game for PC-s with one chip, while the second one renders 8000 edges in real time, with 30 fps, and has 40 000 chips inside, and it was being used for military flight simulations
@@gundamzerostrike Such a dumbass.
40 000 chips, but can it run Crysis?
what kind of gpu did that system have a gtx 1080ti?
@@raven4k998 The GPUs of that time weren't really GPUs, they didn't process anything in terms of computation. These were passive graphics chips in whose graphics memory the CPU pushed the pixels and the graphics chip then only displayed them on the screen. The graphics chip didn't calculate anything at all.
Graphic chips that can calculate 3d calculations themselves came a short time later on special computer hardware in the high-end computing sector.
For consumer PCs, however, it took until around 1996, when the Voodoo Graphics accelerator card appeared at the end of the year and it was only a fixed pipeline graphics chip and thus not very flexible. The first mass-produced GPU that was programmable to some degree was the GeForce 256, released in 1999.
The military industrial complex has massive budgets. That helicopter simulation was at least a decade ahead of what ordinary folks could run at home, and would have seemed like a distant dream to viewers.
It’s interesting how pretty much all the key technologies in use today wouldn’t have progressed, or even existed, without the military requirements pushing progress on. Everything from microelectronics to GPS (original purpose was for submarines to quickly determine where they are before annihilating a few million people). And of course the internet itself.
Nope I’m not passing any moral judgement, but few people appreciate this stuff.
Those graphics are at least 15-16 years ahead of their time. The first commerical PC graphics that had comparable graphics was U.S Navy Fighters, released in 95.
One of the first PC games with texturing was F-15 Strike Eagle 3 and was released in the end of 1992. However, Gouraud shading that can be seen in this military sim too was still missing.
One of the first games i know of that did combine Gouraud shading and texturing on the PC was Strike Commander. Strike Commander was released in April 1993.
So 2 years before the game you mentioned. It might look different on the resolution side. Strike Commander only had a resolution of 320 by 240 pixels. But what resolution this military simulation has is not recognizable. It doesn't look like the resolution is significantly higher.
@@OpenGL4ever The Daimler-Benz-Fahrsimulator (driving simulator of 1984, cost 25 million DM/Deutsche Mark) based on Evans & Sutherland/Gould computer had 6 projectors with each 512*512 pixel@50fps interlaced (256 colours, 1024 brightnesses) to get an idea what these machines were capable.
th-cam.com/users/clipUgkxtUgG7Wtzo-n5ycxkcxrS4pHInRur5nle
Those are some insane graphics in the first report for 1983
Evans & Sutherland made most incredible sim graphics (shaded polygons) in 1970 to early 1980th.
That military simulation was in 1983?! Wow, that looked incredible. We didn't start seeing 3 dimensional games like that until late 4th generation, early 5th (1995).
when are we gonna see this in the arcades... I cant imagine having to grow up and not ever having touched one of those...
I never thought it was possible for such resolution to be achieved in 1983. Amazing!
@5:56, he’s referring to how Gary’s a real pilot. He’s owned and flew several planes.
I flew in helicopter simulators many many times during my Army career. I was an H60 pilot from 2008 to 2013, before I got hurt. The Sims were wonderful for IMD training and process oriented items but they were near impossible to maintain a hover. The graphics left a lot to be desired as depth perception is concerned. I can imagine how terrible those things would have been 25 years prior but it's still impressive.
“You can simulate landing a 747 with its gear up.”
I don’t care what decade it is, everyone wants to do that. 🤣
As of today, you can no longer simulate a 747 crashing into a skyscraper. This feature was removed from the Flight Simulator series after 9/11. It was partially simulated in previous versions. So the decade of the sim matters if you want to try this out of curiosity.
@@OpenGL4ever Ist there still 9-11 hystery, really? AFAIK many "serious" flight simulators just don't show explosions but display a text "accident" and end the flight. Nobody really cares about that. I rather worry that cloud based online sims inform national intelligence when you try to crash into buildings or people with a plane or vehicle (which likely causes thousands of false alarms since every kid tries to do that).
I'm really interested in the hardware that powered that military simulation.
probably Evans and Sutherland
th-cam.com/video/6W-qb_jHRhA/w-d-xo.html
3:01 you know this animation with the wireframed buildings would still look amazing today. It is really stylistic in it's presence. Of course today this would be more awesome if it was procedural generated. So here is a little practice you can do, maybe I should do it, sounds fun!.
Skidmore, Owings and Merrill still exists. Singer sold link to a Canadian company in 1988, and is now a part of L-3 Harris.
Thanks for the info.
11:40 Wow, for a few million dollars and probably a few hundred K a year in maintenance and power bill, you could have had a gaming system as powerful as an N64 with an incomplete version of Pilot Wings 64 in 1983! ;)
No idea you could get graphics like that in 80s... Thought that was a 486 gen invention mind blown
I had a Tandy TRS-80 back then, the military's flight sim really is quite amazing for the time even for a supercomputer. This is when Commodore 64's were the best gaming computers around.
Flight of the Navigator was released in 1986
40,000 chips? Now I can run 40,000 instances of that sim on 1 chip.
Well, 8 CPU's if you want to do a decent job - DCS World, IL2 Series, for instance ...
Gary would go nuts over the latest flight sim.
This must be one of the first lets plays in human history
That dude is really excited about his simulator that does what my phone can do easily. And yes in real time.
Just imagine how these people would flip out if you travel back in time with an Alienware laptop and Crysis3 in it. xD
I guess, any computer program of this time would amaze them. Ok, any, but not Windows 10, Gary would have set: I have already written this GEM clone for the Atari ST :D
Crysis 3?? That game isn’t impressive
Alien ware ? Quality were crud
@ Graphics-wise it was.
@@acmenipponair Gary would be quite impressed with the Windows taskbar at first glance and with a closer look at the NTFS file system and other internal systems.
But in 1983 there was no computer that could run a Windows NT based system, it needed at least a 32-bit processor and protected mode. However, the 386 was not introduced until 1985.
In Microsoft Flight Simulator, I think that was the Sears Tower not the control tower. I know it's not called the Sears Tower anymore.
at 2:30 is that game available for sale on steam I am curious cause it looks like cardboard graphics which is so interesting
ok now stall and crash oh my😲😲
If in 1983 the military has had this kind of hardware and software compared to the arcade games we were playing like Pac-Man and similar, I just could wonder now what kind of simulations they have in 2021, I'm not talking about ARMA 3 or MS Flight simulator, they are just games for common people.
Today most of the processing power is going into better simulation aspects of weapon systems and weapon effects and the distance of the simulated world. The latter uses the computing power at least by a factor of x² as the simulated distance increases.
In a normal computer game, the game world can be large, but the space in which the game world is actively simulated is extremely small.
This has the usual effect that, for example, enemies at long range do not react at all or only react very slowly when you shoot at them. And the effects of weapons have a significantly lower effectiveness with increasing distance than it is the case in reality.
In a game you simply increase the spread of the weapon so that it hits much worse at longer ranges. This forces the player to shoot at the enemy at close range. But in a military simulation, of course, you want the weapon to behave exactly as it does in real life. Thus you will have to increase the simulated bubble in which everything reacts. And that's where all the processing power is going today.
Many professional simulators nowadays look much more primitive than newest game consoles (see my driving simulator history playlist). Possibly this is to guarantee low latency (for reaction test research etc.), but I guess most games now have so much graphics details that it would be to expensive labour for a small science company to add such features. NVidia seems to have cutting-edge graphics in their CARLA simulator, but other pro stuff mostly looks like games from 10 to 20 years ago.
I have played simulator based video games on my Pentium PC in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. I know about the CAD programs which were early drafting tools that were used by architectural firms. Simulator software can be used by either architects to design buildings or drivers education classes to teach people to drive or novice golfers to learn how to swing a golf club for greater accuracy or animators for 3-D effects in movies and on TV or playing more advanced video games.
So 40,000 chips in 1983 was about late 1990's level of 30fps realtime on a desktop with a 3D card. Roughly.
Strike Commander had similar graphics and was released in 1993. You can assume, that the clock rate of these 40000 chips was very low and synching them all did cost CPU power too.
@@OpenGL4ever These were vector computers (SIMD) and the many chips (mostly TTL) rather acted like cells in a modern GPU, likely executing everything synchronously. (Simulators by Evans & Sutherland, often Gould supercomputers).
@20:09
What would you like to do?
LOD! Mesh maps! 3D scanning! Tessellation!
Simulating can be so stimulating.
Wow, what computer was it that had 40k processors? And what processors were they - 8088's / Z80s? I thought this kind of supercomputing wasn't possible with run of the mill desktop chips back then. Wouldn't this massive cluster setup have given the Cray a run for the money? Yes, folks, this COULD have run Crysis... in 1983!
They are talking about CHIPS. Not Processors. CHIPS can mean just 40k of TTL logic chips... and that would be like a processor with 40k transistors. Not more.
No you cant just look at the computing power. To Run Crysis you need Direct x 9 and some modern instructions that simply did not exist back then. Maybe some supercomputing in the 90er has theoretically enough computing power for crysis but they still has a lack of modern instructions to run Crysis.
MegaUnwetter... you just talk about SOFTWARE. And there your mistake comes from: Yes, Crysis wouldn't run natively on the Cray. But you could reprogram it so that it would run, because a modern GPU is nothing but a superscalar parallel vector computer...
And so Crysis could run. Very slow, because instead of 600 or 1200 or whatever cores you would only have one Cray I core to do the vector calculations :D
And when it comes to instructions, you are also wrong. A processor don't need to know many instructions. Only plus, minus, mul, div, some condition testing and jump routines. Everything else can be programmed out of these simple instructions. In fact: MODERN CPUs only use these routines to work.
A modern ARM processor as well as any AMD or Intel processor are in reality RISC-computers. They have natively only a small instruction set. The only difference is, that for example the Intel Core CPUs can be programmed in x64 and x86 mode, which means, your assembler code is really big and has many instructions... and when the CPU gets the instructions, it recompiles these instructions into the simple RISC code. So you as a programmer, even when you write time critical machine code, can write easily and the computer interprets your code on the fly. Unlike the 1980s he can do it super fast, so that you don't feel it anymore.
@@acmenipponair you can build a general purpose cpu with just one math instruction, all you need is substract.
My favorite part of the music intro is at 0:19 - 0:47.
I love the theme jingle to this show.
11:15 those graphics in 1983. Now I know where Carmack got his ideas from.
I love watching these
It's interesting hearing them talk about this stuff that was brand new at the time. Today it's commonplace and cheap. You can even download a state of the art game engine right now and make something yourself if you have the brains for it. The military only simulator Virtual Battle Space is based on the game ARMA.
1983 multi-million dollar supercomputer. 1993 jungle strike on Sega Genesis
0:39 does anyone know what language this code is written in?
assembly back then everything was in assembly or basic however basic was way to slow for stuff like that assembly was atleast 100 times faster then anything written in basic so for the super computer military app had to be assembly for the shear speed to achieve that kind of performance back then to even have a chance at that level of graphics
I wonder what games would've been like if they'd had today's computers back then...
They had shadings n stuff back then, almost a game sim from 1993
Exactly Shading and textures. That was available in 1993 in Strike Commander.
18:34 *Of course* the north side of the building in the northern hemisphere is shadowed all afternoon.
The architecture software reminds me of the death star plans from star wars 1977.. although in 1977 they had to hand animate it I think.
Over 20 years ago, I knew and worked with Loren Carpenter from Pixar and previously from Lucasfilm. He told me that he (co-?)wrote the software that rendered the animation of the Death Star.
Oops! I remembered that it was the Death Star animation in Return of the Jedi that he did. I looked it up, though, and Larry Cuba and some other CalArts students created the animation on "the JPL computer".
motionographer.com/2008/03/31/larry-cuba-star-wars-computer-animation/
starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Death_Star_plans#Behind_the_scenes
www.starwars.com/news/death-star-plans-are-in-the-main-computer-and-special-postcard
@@RetroDawn Did he also made the base star and cylon grid models of the computer software that is shown in the Battlestar Galactica TV-Series from the 80thies?
AFAIK early movie vector graphics was plotted on paper page by page and then photographed onto film like a handdrawn cartoon movie.
Comparing to X-plane 5 that launched in 1999, 16 years later, this military simulation still looks more appealing in some aspects. The physics calculations may be not as advanced but the visual side is subjectively nicer. And what’s even more impressive, XP5 didn’t run nearly as smooth even on top tier PCs of 1999/2000.
Someone should show them MS flight simulator 2020 :D
@SteelRodent it does not have to be it is far superior to that old military app
This shows the dominance of the IBM PC compatible at the time. Had they shown the Amiga it would have made the military simulation look like a child's drawing. Industry often causes progress latency.
If I could talk to a dead person (not family) I'd love to speak with Gary Kildall. Honestly came across so humble despite being a genius. So sad he passed so young.
DR-DOS 3.40 was my first operating system and it was from Digital Research, the company of Gary Kildall. In some aspects it was better than MS-DOS of that time.
I want to get one of these simulation computers and run quake on it.
What a pointless endevour
Quake requires at least 8 MiB of RAM, thus you have no chance to run it on such a machine.
I didn't get to see such graphics until Operation Flashpoint in 2001.
Operation Flashpoint was much more advanced than this. OFP did make use of 3d acceleration videocards, thus it had much higher resolutions, mip mapping, texture filtering and other graphics effects.
What you can see in the military sim in the video is basically Gouraud Shading combined with texturing and a low polygon count at a low resolution.
Both Gouraud Shading and texturing at similar resolutions was available in 1993 on the PC in Strike Commander.
@@OpenGL4ever That Evans & Sutherland stuff (likely on Gould supercomputers) AFAIK had specialized antialiasing and colour grading hardware (possibly all analogue, like in synthesizers) that gave its low polygon rendering a special look. Gaming stuff with similar graphics typically had no antialiasing at all.
@@cyberyogicowindler2448 Thank you for the information.
@18:40 1983 RayTracing ? 🤨😱
Without them, you couldn´t play 'Gears of War' nowadays.
I would love to have a Time Machine and walk in the studio with a 13900k with a 3080ti running Microsoft Flight simulator and watch their facial reactions
super old fashion documentary:P like
Slow down my gpu is on fire
Wait for the MS Flight Simulator 2020
now the simulation is a guy using a monitor shooting at real people from a gunship.
I think Gary became bitter by the early 90s, with his rival Bill Gates scaling new heights. I feel bad for Gary because he was a such a good guy..only too idealistic...
Stew says the graphics of that military sim were "simplistic." Sorry, what the hell are you talking about? In 1983 those graphics were revolutionary. There wasn't a single arcade game or home computer that could even APPROACH something like that in 1983, we wouldn't see home graphics like that until around 1997 when 3DFX released their first graphics card. Those primitive flight sims chunking along at 1 frame per second are a joke compared to that military tech you showed.
40 years later, and Lewandowski was right on the money.
The little trumpets 🎺
how did hey have graphics like that in 1983? i dont understand?
oh nevermind, he said his computer had 40,000 cpu's in it. LMAO... i wrote this comment before i saw that terrible pc flight simulator they showed after the one with the 3d graphics.
@@ken-camo It likely had 40000 TTL chips (74LS etc.). Impressive simulators were typically by Evans & Sutherland, and the graphics supercomputer by Gould (cost many million $).
But would it run Crysis?
No, it would run out of memory.
3:45 south park warfare game I wish I could buy that game on steam 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
My first sim was FS 4.0 on a 80286. FS 2020 is runnuing on a gaming console today. 🤣
What old timer computer person doesn't remember MS Flight Simulator? What old timer computer person didn't learn to hate MS Flight Simulator?
5:36 "attitude indicator" Hmm, I didn't know planes had those. looks like the plane is feeling -.-
I wonder if Flight sims past and present was used to train pilots.
It feels like the grey haired guy has seen some stuff
I think he got convicted of being a concentration camp guard
What kind of graphics card do I need to run this? Will my GTX 770 work?
No. you'll need atleast a gtx980. You'll get around just 15-20fps tho
Poor Gary... He could be millonaire if he had accepted CP/M as the OS for the IBM PC.
Sorry, you are falling on an urban legend. Gary Kindall wanted CP/M on the IBM PC. In fact, he even sued IBM so that they had to offer also the PC with CP/M.
The reason that CP/M wasn't on the computers at the first place, was, that Gary Kindall was a typical silicon valley hippie computer geek. And when IBM wanted a "nondisclosure agreement" before any talks, he refused. That was not his mindset.
CP/M later didn't became a hit for two reasons: First of all, Lotus 1-2-3 worked with MS/PC-DOS. And that was THE office suite of the 1980s. Second of all, IBM offered CP/M 86 for 250 dollar, meanwhile you could get MS-DOS for 29 dollars. So microsoft won.
He was also very well off, he had his own plane and ferarri. Money wasnt the sad part of the story
What's more sad is the fact that he left us when this show is still a thing on the TV meaning he doesn't even got a chance to witness how advanced the new computer tech nowadays are. Bill Gates really are blessed with long lifespan while being one of the faces on this sector of technology.
@@acmenipponair In addition, MS-DOS from version 2.0 supported a hierarchical file system. MS-DOS 2.0 was released in March 1983. This made subfolders possible. CP/M did not support this.
Digital Research later created DR-DOS to have a compatible operating system available.
@@adamantine001 I disagree. Gary Kildall died in July 1994, but Windows NT 3.1 was released in July 1993 and the still DOS based Windows 3.1 was already available to the masses. Thus with Windows NT it was clear, where the marked would move on.
He lost with the success of Windows 3.0. Windows 3.0 was a system, he couldn't re-implement without getting into the trouble of possible violations.
Most realistic military simulator would have a cabin with built in explosives that would simulate the impact of the ground or of an enemy rocket should the trainee fail his mission. Just to keep them honest (and dead).
I wonder what kind of games super computers today could produce. Real time raytracing should be cool in games.
the prophecy has been fulfilled!
@@nerd2544 Yup but not how I imagined it 😅 unreal 5 is more like it😏
@@FullFledged2010 damn you still alive
@@nerd2544 😉
GPU power has become almost pointless. It's AI which will make difference when hooked to a supercomputer (or its equivalent) in cloud games, and I worry that it won't make the mankind better but only companies greedier and more effective to spy the people.
And while I'm watching them talking about simulations of 1983, I'm building a ship in Minecraft :D
You will never get that time back
The militaray was always ahead of current technology for a decade or more
Flight Sim 2020 eat your heart out
Ummm. Simulators have come a long way
Put FS 2020 infront of 1983 Computer Chronicles
Colonel Sanders is never able to answer the question he's asked lol
He answered them all quite well. What did you watch?
after watching this show .. its much older than i , "im in my 30's" this show has so many , mostly in the early years of the show .. "it like, use computer for war " constantly ... watch the AI epp ... it's like the show was use as cold war propaganda
"Si vis pacem, para bellum" (If you wish peace, prepare for war.)
PC Man @ 2:34
Waiting for the new Flight Simulator for the new Xbox & PC
@3:30 jesus
7:07 KFC
I have a pocket full of quarters....
I AM THE GREATEST!
Cook em
Smash em
Fry em
Trash em
Bake em
Boil em
Bite em
Kick em
Punch em
Jab em
Stab em
ALL GONE BYE-BYE!
I was playing Minecraft while watching this. Many many orders of magnitude more sophisticated than any of the simulator software shown here.
Am playing minecraft on xbox 1 and it is
6 years ago from the last update.
It bad
@9:45 that missile shot simulation was so bad none of those destroyed Soviet tanks threw their turrets!
they would shit their pants now, if they seen GTA5
firewallsniper no they wouldnt as gta 5 is pretty primitive. they would be more impressed with games from the late 90's like falcon 4.0 which is much more impressive as a simulator. only thing close is something by dcs which is about the only hyper realistic sim maker along with the xplane guys
Stewart Cheifet is still alive. These guys knew where technology was headed though. They were interested in what was doable in their time.
0:06 still I can do it faster than if u use an Calculator . Lets try this ( calculate from 1 to 100 (5500 on total)). I can do it faster use ( Chinese calculator 珠算器）.in fact ,no need to input if u (do Chinese calculator) faster or fast enough. It just changed math to (graphics ) 珠算其实是图形计算 不是数学计算 所以输入快 计算快，
And you would shit your pants if you'd see a Cray-2 (which already existed as a prototype in 1983) benchmarked vs. an ipad. Spoiler alert: same performance, with a very slight edge in favor of the Cray-2. They didn't have ANY performance issues 30 years ago, the price/performance ratio was the true bottleneck. Also with such primitive traffic AI like the one GTA5 has, you'd have been laughed out of the room. The simulation is what needs to be accurate and lifelike, not its visual presentation.
@@CommieRedM That's not quite true. There is also Steel Beasts Pro PE. And Arma 3 is also used in the military in some countries.
Looks like shit compared to today's technology even little kid's games Looks way better then that today