This was me only 15 years earlier. My math teacher had a TRS-80 and an early flight sim. For terrain it had a grid, an airport, and a simple, flat, mountain range. It was loaded from cassette.
He didn’t know the math. In fact when he was teaching us matrices in Algebra II, he really couldn’t answer how matrices were used in the “real world”.
But somehow I managed to track down a couple year old Byte magazine that had an article on 3D graphics, and it was all about matrices and points to do rotations and what not.
With that, I got a cube to rotate on a PET 2001. In all it’s 40x24 glory. Well, there were 8 dots. If you squinted in low light, it would look like a cube.
Later, in college I got access to a textronix storage tube microcomputer. It was standalone in contrast to their terminals. That was able to render a cube quite well. And the car I painstakingly created on graph paper and keyed into DATA statements using the machines built in BASIC.
By then, early Foley-Van Dam was the coveted graphics book to get.
He didn’t know the math. In fact when he was teaching us matrices in Algebra II, he really couldn’t answer how matrices were used in the “real world”.
But somehow I managed to track down a couple year old Byte magazine that had an article on 3D graphics, and it was all about matrices and points to do rotations and what not.
With that, I got a cube to rotate on a PET 2001. In all it’s 40x24 glory. Well, there were 8 dots. If you squinted in low light, it would look like a cube.
Later, in college I got access to a textronix storage tube microcomputer. It was standalone in contrast to their terminals. That was able to render a cube quite well. And the car I painstakingly created on graph paper and keyed into DATA statements using the machines built in BASIC.
By then, early Foley-Van Dam was the coveted graphics book to get.