Octas/cyber

The first computers were monochromatic, often using cheap eye-searing green-phosphor CRT screens. Unless you were a little richer than the average cash-starved student or enthusiast and could afford to not assault your eyes, in which case a system with amber or even white phosphors may have been your thing. All these ancient systems have long since been assigned to museums or smashed by teenagers making edgy pop-music video clips.

A few early systems also dabbled with 20-colour pallets, which were an improvement only in a matter of degree.

It was the 6-bit colour pallet that is considered the first actually-pleasant-to-use system, assigning two bits to each colour channel red, green, and blue. The higher two bits were often left unimplemented, saving 20% of the video-buffer-memory costs. In system memory, the most common use of these two bits was for a transparency level for merging fresh graphics over existing, providing a primitive form of anti-aliasing.

The biggest advantage of this format was that a graphical 'pixel' took exactly one 10-bit byte, allowing graphics to be processed by ubiquitous byte-native processors of the time without any bit-field manipulation. This could result in graphics being an order of magnitude or more faster, even accounting for the wider data-width in use, compared to 4- 2- or 1-bit graphics.

Some manufacturers did experiment with other formats such as 7-bits covering 175-colours (5 levels per channel) and a 10-bit colour space providing 400 colours from a larger pallet, but the simplicity of the 6-bit colour space won out, for its era.

Today, the 36-bit colour space has long-since superseded this format, however it does live on in the form of 'retro' games and other applications that use the 6-bit pallet for its look reminiscent of simpler times past.

One notable hold-over is the Ladybug Portable Learning Terminal, which is a rugged, but extremely low-cost, platform targeting the poorer end of the Education market. In its entry-level model, it features a 100-colour, 1200x550 pixel screen, which is considered barely usable by modern standards, but is adequate for low-end educational programs and the above-mentioned 'retro' games.

Modern computers use a 36-bit colour space, sometimes called HDR (High Dynamic Range) colour. With 12-bits, or 2000 levels, per colour channel, this range covers the full optical range of human vision. Higher colour-depths are generally only used in the editing of visual content, and there are no displays actually capable of showing these as we couldn't see the difference anyway!

As memory prices came down, it became viable to start producing computers capable of more than the 100 colours of the ubiquitous-at-the-time 6-bit colour space. After a few abortive and largely unsuccessful attempts at systems based on a two-byte 14-bit colour space providing 10000 colours, and a 1-byte-per-colour 30-bit colour space, the industry settled on going strait to a 36-bit colour space as it was clear that this would be the ultimate end anyway. It also fit well with the rapidly emerging popularity of 40-bit processors, which could process this data one whole pixel at a time.

Rather than go strait to a full 40-bit implementation, manufacturers could just fill in the higher bits of each colour channel initially, adding more bit depth downwards for greater granularity as silicon-prices permitted. Providing empty chip sockets or card-slots for after-market upgrading of colour depth was also common.

The major advantage of this approach was compatibility, with software able to largely ignore the physical colour depth of the frame buffer and just write out 36-bit values. The user would see greater or lesser colour fidelity based on their video-memory depth, but the software need not care.

The extra two bits were also often used as a low-depth transparency channel, a carry-over from the 6-bit colour format. It was inadequate for work requiring fine control of transparency effects, but proved perfectly adequate for user-interface-level and fast-anti-aliasing tasks in non-professional-graphics applications, which was the vast majority of use.

Even the Ladybug 40-bit Portable Terminal, best known for being the last 6-bit-colour system still in production, supports 36-bit-colour internally, and after-market screen and video-memory upgrades are available to add this feature without any software changes required at all.

[ComEd: There are opinions in this entry which the maintainer probably should remove, or cite as popular opinion].

Dæmon is a virtual machine that allows 'write once run anywhere' software (in theory, at least!). It provides a common base on which software may (should!) run independently of the underlying hardware.

The name 'Dæmon' is derived from the helpful beings of folklore (and not, as one might think, because the whole environment was dreamed up by Satan himself!).

Dæmonic is a highly popular business-systems and DataNet programming language which runs on the Dæmon virtual-machine engine. Originally an interpreted language, it's modern form is usually Just-In-Time compiled and can achieve near-native-code speeds for the types of applications it is most commonly used for. Even in environments that can benefit from more specialised programming languages and native-compiled code, Dæmonic is often the 'glue' binding all the disparate system components together.

This early display technology used a mesh of wires running before and behind cells of ionised gas. It had a primary advantage that when a cell was energised it would retain its 'lit' state so long as the display had power. As such, it served as an integrated display memory, removing the need for storing a frame-buffer in silicon memory. This was quite useful in an age where such memory cost many tens of dollars per kilobyte. This could allow screen resolutions of up to 1000x1000 bit-mapped pixels in an era when a CRT-based system could only afford buffer memory for 400 characters of pure text.

The primary down-sides of the technology were its relative high cost of manufacture compared to CRTs and its mono-chromatic nature.

As memory prices fell, the costs of a frame-buffer plus a CRT started to become competitive, however just as the DGP-display was in its end stages, the Colour Digital Gas Plasma Display was invented by a small computer-kit company Ladybug Compute. A logical extension of the monochromatic version, cells of red, green and blue were packed sequentially, at the expense of dropping resolution to 400x1000. But this provided a 10-colour pixel-graphics screen, again without the need for video memory.

Quickly this was extended to two cells per colour channel (R/G/B) with one cell twice the size (so brightness) of the other, providing a direct binary for four levels of each channel, 6-bits total for 100 colours. This came at the cost of vertical resolution, and a screen size of 400x200 pixels in a ½x¼ (16.8mmx8.4mm) panel was ultimately settled on, primarily because it could easily be wired into the 40kB at the top half of common 10-bit CPUs' 20-bit address range.

Larger 1x½ displays suitable for arcade cabinets with a resolution of 1000x400 were also produced in lower quantities. Also finding use in expensive workstation-class computers, these larger displays proved too difficult to reliably mass-produce for mainstream use. Attempts to increase resolution, size and number of colours proved economically nonviable. The low-colour nature of the display made them unsuitable for television applications, so they were never able so gain the mass-production advantage which that sector might have provided.

Pulsed Gas Plasma Display technology ultimately superseded CDGPD, able to provide higher screen-size, resolution and colour depth, at the cost of requiring video-buffer memory. Then the lower power and lighter LCD technology, followed by a complex interplay between LCD and LED back-lighting leading, ultimately, to the pure µLED displays of today.

One final legacy of DGPD technology was its contribution to the broad adoption of the 6-bit colour space, of which it was the pioneer. The length of time for which the technology dominated the small-computer field resulted in a lot of software optimised for this colour range, as well as a general public expectation, with the bright limited-colour displays deeply embedded in popular culture.

Leveraging their newly perfected Colour Digital Gas Plasma Display, Ladybug Compute, a small manufacturer of educational computer kits, rapidly became a dominant player in the emerging arcade-cabinet market. The unique flat-screen technology, made the cabinets popular with arcades, who could mount them on walls to optimise floor-space and so increase machines available per square foot. From the consumer side, the bright and colourful displays had great appeal.

As an education-market supplier in other fields, Ladybug had a policy not to produce games that involved inter-personal violence. They also avoided games depicting real sports, their CEO famously claiming that "children should be playing the sports, not a game of them." Another, seemingly informal, policy was against games involving cars, for which an explanation has never been forthcoming beyond a rumoured comment by the Ladybug CEO on the matter: "I like trains."

Ladybug Compute did not, however, prohibit third parties from developing such games for their platform, and provided hardware and programming tools for this to be done. Other game creators took Ladybug Compute's product-preference quirks and ran with them, producing many successful additional games for the platform. It is believed that having explicit areas where the console supplier would not compete with their own customers was a great benefit to the platform. This is assumed to be un-intentional, however.

Although the units are no-longer manufactured, and the Colour Digital Gas-plasma Displays themselves have mostly degraded, there are a number of third-party conversion kits available for fitting modern frame-buffered µLED displays into the distinctive cast-aluminium chassis units, which are still popular with collectors. Even some VR-arcades maintain cabinets for public use as a customer curiosity.

Above: Ladybug Arcade wall-mount cabinet.

Also known colloquially as the Ladybug PET.

The Ladybug Portable Education Terminal represented Ladybug Compute's, move from the supply of self-assemble 10-bit computer kits for enthusiasts to pre-assembled home/school computers.

The simple 10-bit CPU included three in-built 10-bit (6-bits exposed) bank-addressing register, with separate banks for read, write, and execute (instruction fetch) activated by bus and internal state signals. This simple, yet innovative, system allowed both efficient copying of data between banks as well as direct execution of instruction code from entirely different banks to where data was being accessed or stored.

This machine was a 10-bit system with 20kB of RWM and 14kB of primary ROM, plus 40kB of memory space dedicated to its 400x200 pixel 6-bit (100-colour) display. This display address space was also bank-switched with up to 77x 40kB banks of plug-in memory distributed across 10 'slots':

• Slot 0: Screen, and 7 banks (340kB max) of included software.
• Slots 1-6: Internal expansion sockets (400kB max each).
• Slot 7: external cartridge port (400kB max).

Initially these memory sizes were considered ludicrously large, compared to what was economically feasible at the time, however the allowance proved highly beneficial in the long term as it allowed the Ladybug-PET to continue serving the low-end market effectively long after other 10-bit computer systems had fallen to the 40-bit era.

It was theoretically possible to remove the chip from a cartridge and permanently install it to an internal socket. Some cartridges were designed, in software and hardware, to allow this. Some were not compatible with doing so although enthusiasts often found ways to achieve it anyway, often by modifying the software and 'burning' it on to a suitable EPROM chip.

The Ladybug portion of bank-switched ROM came with a simple but extensive set of software called the Productivity/Creativity/Communications suite (or PCC), which - while notably simple - did provide all of the most commonly-useful tools in these three spheres. Much modern software can trace its roots to this software set. Likewise, many data formats and communications protocols also have origins in this primitive software suite.

Data storage, and non-ROM software was achieved via a custom tape deck that used standard audio cassette tapes. By utilising a stereo record-head, one track was used for primary data storage, and the other used for indexing. The Index track could be read at 10x the speed of the data track, allowing the computer to automatically and (moderately) quickly find data arbitrarily on the tape. Although still much slower than even floppy disks of the day, the high capacity and low cost of generic audio cassette tapes meant that this format remained popular, even with the event of third-party 5¼" floppy disk drives for the Ladybug platform.

Much software ran on a simple ROM-resident GUI, the first available outside of a research laboratory environment. While not complex or particularly fast by modern standards, it was surprisingly good for its era, mainly due to a simple but flexible DMA graphics co-processor which off-loaded much of the mundane pixel-moving work that had to be performed by the CPU on competing systems. It had the following key features/capabilities:

• Bank aware, able to directly access memory in bank-switched regions without CPU assistance.
• A simple in-memory list of 2D copy-region commands was constantly cycled through, and often the CPU only had to update a byte or two on this list to cause significant screen changes.
• Graphical 'sprites' of arbitrary size (2^x by 2^y size-restricted).
• Automatic Tiling, leveraging options for staggered and overlapping tile-rows plus 'transparency bits' in the tile data to support square, hexagonal and isometric tiling styles.
• A Tiling mode that could emulate the then-standard 40x10 screen of 10x20-pixel characters as well as a denser 40x20 screen of 10x10 characters. Because these were emulated text modes, pixel-graphics could still be drawn with or even over or under text. Complicated text arrangements such as variable-width characters required the CPU to take over drawing, however, and were much slower, if used.
• Automatic bounds clipping per copy-block group.
• Pallet-based colour conversion from 1/2/4-bit graphics in main memory (mainly to save valuable memory space, but some interesting effects were also possible using pallets).

Likewise, a DMA-driven audio-synthesis chip:

• Bank aware, able to directly access memory in bank-switched regions without CPU assistance.
• A simple in-memory list of register-load commands was constantly cycled through at fixed rate, allowing pre-set music to be played with no need for CPU intervention.
• Jump points in the music track referencing a chip-register allowed game-music to change 'mood' within its pre-set sound-loop with a single-register change by the CPU. This was particularly useful for soundscape changes during games.
• Four audio channels with independent L/R balance.
• Synthesis of square, triangle, sawtooth and noise waveforms.
• Sound envelope control over Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release.

Built-in wired network connectivity could connect directly to a standard LocalNet server port, or to an external modem for PhoneNet access to remote servers.

These features, as programmers learned their tricks and quirks, resulted in many innovative games and other software that was well ahead of what other systems using the same processors were capable of. Even today, the origional 10-bit machines are used by creators of 'demo' software for the demonstration of their coding skills within a powerful-for-its-day, yet fundamentally limited system.

The system, while portable, was not battery powered, requiring a mains power source for operation. It was, however, simple to bypass the internal power supply to drive the machine from a 3.4-4.4oPV (23-30V) supply as available from standard vehicle-batteries (3.6oPV) of the time.

All these innovative features allowed the Ladybug-PET to dominate the 10-bit computer market throughout the 10-bit era, with unit-sales far-exceeding all competing 10-bit systems combined.

Other notable technologies introduced by the Ladybug Portable Education Terminal which are ubiquitous today include:

• LatSCII multi-lingual 7-bit character encoding.
• The 'A-raked' LatSCII multi-lingual keyboard layout.
• The first simple mono-tasking GUI available to the public.
• The first mainstream use of the TrackBall, and later the invention of the optical ThumbTrak which replaced it for some time, both since superseded by the TrackPad, developed elsewhere but used in the current-model Ladybug 40-bit Portable Terminal.
• The 'clamshell' portable computer chassis, initially made possible by their flat-panel Colour Digital Gas-plasma Display technology. Ladybug Compute continue to use a very similar cast-aluminium chassis today, for although it is large and blocky, it has proven to be extremely rugged for the education market they primarily sell into.
• The modern 10kx4k media screen is derived from repeated doublings of the origional 2:1 aspect-ratio 400x200 Ladybug Colour Digital Gas-plasma Display. [citation needed]

As a result of their innovative 10-bit design being so future-proof, Ladybug was the last notable manufacturer to switch to a 40-bit platform, and while their Ladybug 40-bit Portable Terminal is quite successful in the ultra-low-end education market, they entirely lost their huge early-mainstream lead to other earlier-to-change manufacturers.

Ladybug Compute is yet to release a 100-bit system.

Above: Origional Ladybug Portable Educational Terminal (L-PET).

Also known colloquially as the Ladybug 40 or simply Ladybug.

The Ladybug 40-bit Portable Terminal is the current version of Ladybug Compute's ultra-low-end education terminal.

Its base configuration is:

• 10-core VectorRISC CPU (3-stage pipeline 'simplex' cores).
• DMA Video Controller:
• Fully backward-compatible with 10-bit ancestor.
• 36-bit colour aware, including 'dithering' true-colour down to the default 100-colour display.
• Video de/compression acceleration.
• DMA Audio Synthesizer:
• Fully backward-compatible with 10-bit ancestor.
• 20-bit stereo PCM audio in+out.
• Audio de/compression acceleration.
• Basic hardware 2D/3D vector-graphics scene-graph interpreter.
• Wired and wireless network connectivity.
• 1200x550 64-colour µLED display, minimally capable for a simple multitasking OS.
• 1000x400 22-bit-colour 'webcam'.
• LatSCII keyboard with TrackPad pointer controller.
• 7-day battery life under typical usage. Months in low-power operation.
• Ruggedised cast-aluminium chassis.

Being quite late to enter the 40-bit computer space, Ladybug was able to apply a number of now-established technologies to their in-house developed microchip hardware. They were also able to skip over a good number of the classic 'mistakes' of their quicker competitors by learning from them. Ladybug was, however, too late to market with a device that was only modestly more innovative than now-established 40-bit systems, and failed to leverage their 10-bit success for any real traction in the 40-bit-systems market.

The high degree of hardware backward-compatibility with the 10-bit Ladybug Portable Education Terminal was, however, considered highly beneficial in the education market during the 10-bit to 40-bit transition period when being able to efficiently and accurately emulate 10-bit software was a feature considered essential by schools with limited budgets for upgrading/replacing teaching materials and associated software.

The features are still quite valued today in that market for making simple but powerful graphics and sound synthesis highly-accessible to technology learners. Technology hobbyists likewise find the features useful for implementing retro-style games and 'demos' on the newer system.

Because the features are provided directly by hardware, the 'retro' effects are extremely efficient compared to software-emulated equivalents on other systems. This allows the Ladybug 40's relatively-weak processor cores to hold their own against much more capable systems in this specific software field.

Above: Current Ladybug 40-bit Portable Terminal.

Additionally, there are a number of popular aftermarket 'mods', both official and third-party, that can be made to a standard-release Ladybug 40 system, such as:

• True 36-bit 2400x1320 µLED display (still quite low-resolution by modern standards, but perfectly adequate for general use).
• 36-bit 2000x1000 WebCam.
• Faster CPUs. Various combinations of extra cores, more-performant cores, and/or additional cache memory.
• Higher-capacity local-storage chip-cards.
• A wide assortment of sensors and actuators.

The Ladybug Compute education-oriented Operating System (EdOS) is quite simple, and infamously light on local security features. While the device is consumer-grade-secure against network attack, it is quite easy to bypass OS security when working with the physical machine. This makes it a prime target for 'hacking' in the more conventional sense of users modifying their own hardware and software, which is considered a major benefit of the system by people inclined to such activities.

As a result, the Ladybug 40 is extremely popular with technology hobbyists for both its low cost, and the ease with which the operating software can be altered and customised to suit individual needs.

The rugged cast-aluminium case is a stylistic legacy from the old 10-bit days, and while a much slimmer and lighter case is possible (and available as a third-part modification), hobbyists tend to prefer the 'chunky' case for its generous internal space enabling the addition of significant hardware modifications.

The aluminium chassis itself is highly suitable for machining new cavities and ports into and even welding on expansion boxes, further adding to the appeal of the form factor, despite the added weight of the design, compared to modern slimline magnesium or polymerese chassis styles.

Another advantage of the large chassis size is that it allows for a much higher-capacity standard battery than is present in other contemporary portable terminal equipment. This, along with its general schoolyard-hardened nature, makes the equipment highly useful in field-research applications. Again, the ample space for additional custom sensors and ports is also advantageous here.