Ideas are interconnected

That was the time, we were growing out of DOS and BASIC systems - into the fabulous world of Graphics and Multi-media. And for most of our teeming minds at school, the choice of their summer project was a natural one, to do a paint-brush application.

Standing out with SVGA

When one of my pal, a self educated programmer (actually he is more like scientific adventurer than a programmer) chose to do paint-brush application, I thought, another mind wasted on a me-too project. Soon, he called me to his study and showed me his creation. The paint-brush tool. It had more or less the same features that any regular pain-brush application had, but wait, there was something different in the look and feel ! He had chosen to do the whole thing using SVGA graphics as opposed to doing it with standard VGA mode libraries shipped with the Turbo-C compiler. I should say that he literally created his own GUI library to do his application.

FAT16 and 640K limit

Now, he did not stop at that. We where talking about FAT16 file system (which was kind of related to a project I was doing) when I found a gleam in his eyes. Once again I landed in his study. This time he showed me how to manipulate large image files and sequence them together to create some sort of animation. Apparently he got over the 640K limitation in DOS using EMM386 driver and a custom made file allocator similar to FAT16’s techniques (remember the gleam !). That was good, well, better than a pain-brush application.

It all started as paint-brush

Time went on, and got another invitation to take a glimpse into what he was doing, this time though, his demonstration was more interactive. That is, he called me closer, gave me a mike and told me to say ‘aaah’, and I religiously told ‘aaah’, and ta-da there comes ‘அ’ on the screen ! Then showed me a video, a chasing cheetah. You guessed it, the video was running in his so called paint-brush program using some sort of temporal and spatial compression between image frames, rendered in his SVGA window, and using his memory allocator to get over the 640K limitation. Unfortunately, before he could solve “Goldbach conjecture”, “Riemann hypothesis” and a host of other pressing problems using his paint-brush application, we all graduated.

Ideas have to evolve, and it evolves better across multiple minds. So, let your ideas out and follow them, hopefully you will get some company and reap the benefits.