Al Alcorn, creator of Pong, explains the NTSC color graphics trick

Re:Al Alcorn, creator of Pong, explains the NTSC color graph... by dreamcompiler on Thursday April 30, 2020 @10:23AM (#23031083)

I started college in EE at UT Austin in 1978. The rent on my two-bedroom apartment was $180/month. My textbooks cost about $300/semester. My tuition was something like $10/credit hour/semester. I don't remember the exact number because even on my very limited budget, it was in the noise.

I stayed in Austin for grad school. Pre-turtleneck Steve Jobs came to campus in 1984 and gave a talk about how great his new computer was, and told us he'd let us all buy one for half price. I bought one of those "Macintosh" things, plus a Lisa to develop for it, and the rest for me was history.

Interesting tidbit: Because Macs were cheap for students in Austin, a lot of great Mac developer talent sprang up there. Jeff Kodosky prototyped a really cool visual programming language on the first Mac, then hired several UT students to productize it into a commercial engineering tool. He called it LabView.

https://www.ni.com/en-us/about-ni/leadership/kodosky.html

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Re:Al Alcorn, creator of Pong, explains the NTSC color graph... by wolfhumble on Thursday April 30, 2020 @02:27PM (#23034275)

According to https://www.usinflationcalculator.com monthly apartment rental of $180/month would be $713 today, and the textbooks of $300/semester would be $1,188 today.

According to https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market-trends/us/tx/au... the average cost for an apartment in the neighborhood of the University of Texas at Austin is $2,581.

:-)

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