I ignored PCs altogether. They were useless toys back then.
We had SGIs, so who cared about PCs?
> devs often reached below the abstraction, manually twiddling registers in the hardware
And we're still doing it, nothing changed. Want performance and control - go low level. Want uniform APIs - use what your vendors are trying to feed you with.
> you're mostly talking about non-consumer hardware
An SGI station is still a kind of a "consumer" hardware.
Who's "we"? If you mean that they existed, then OK, I can't argue that. I've never known anyone that had one, but hundreds who had PC-level hardware.
>And we're still doing it, nothing changed. Want performance and control - go low level.
Low-level has changed significantly in meaning. Now maybe someone would try to go through the driver instead of the higher-level API, but no one's going to do direct register writes. Modern hardware isn't usable at that level.
> An SGI station is still a kind of a "consumer" hardware.
Not a mainstream one by most measures, which is what I was trying to get at.
Not that much, actually, just shifted to the other domains.
> but no one's going to do direct register writes.
You'd be surprised. People even do bit-banging now (could you imagine bit-banging a VGA port directly in the past?).
> Modern hardware isn't usable at that level.
Is something like VC4 GPU modern enough? People do work with it on a very low level, thanks to the open specs. See this for example: https://github.com/mn416/QPULib
Actually, all the modern GPUs are getting simpler and more unifirm, so it's getting easier to hack them on a low level.
I ignored PCs altogether. They were useless toys back then.
We had SGIs, so who cared about PCs?
> devs often reached below the abstraction, manually twiddling registers in the hardware
And we're still doing it, nothing changed. Want performance and control - go low level. Want uniform APIs - use what your vendors are trying to feed you with.
> you're mostly talking about non-consumer hardware
An SGI station is still a kind of a "consumer" hardware.