Chapter 10. Windows Vista and Gaming
In his 2005 book What the Dormouse Said, journalist John Markoff describes how the 1960s counterculture gave rise to and shaped the personal computer industry. At one point, he tells the story of how engineers at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) decided to create their own version of Spacewar, the world's first computer game (invented by MIT hacker Stephen Russell in 1962). SAIL used a time-sharing system in which a number of terminals competed for the resources of a single minicomputer, and this often caused the Spacewar screen to freeze while it waited for processor cycles. To fix this problem, the Stanford engineers invented a new operating system mode that doled out processor resources in sixtieth-of-a-second slices, which improved the performance not only of Spacewar, but also of many other applications. Markoff concludes the story:
That incident occurred 40 years ago, and gaming has been leaping ahead of the PC industry and dragging it along it in its wake ever since. Whether it's video hardware, networking advances, or graphics programming, game developers and hardcore gamers continually push PCs to their limits in the quest for higher-quality gaming experiences. Windows Vista will be known as the first Windows OS that targets gamers directly. Why the sudden focus on gaming? Probably because Microsoft's own research uncovered an interesting and surprising fact: Gaming is the second most popular PC activity, well behind web surfing, but more popular even than email. Amazingly, about 1 in 5 users play games on their Windows PCs, which is a huge user base that Microsoft figures it can no longer ignore. As you'll see in this chapter, Vista includes many new features that are aimed directly at the gaming market, including game developers, the gamers themselves (both hardcore and casual), and even their concerned parents. |
EAN: 2147483647
Pages: 122