What the Commodore 64 can Teach Us About Ajax

Dietrich Kappe, Thursday, March 30, 2006 @ 9:00 am

Here's just a little sampling of articles from the November 1983 issue of COMPUTE!'s Gazette.

• Computer Graphics - The Age Of Electronic Art
• VIC Super Expander Graphics64
• Introduction To Custom Characters For VIC And 64
• VICreations: Animating With Custom Characters

It seems every issue would have at least two articles on how to twiddle the graphical bits on the C64 or VIC-20, articles on how to make sprites dance across the screen or writing your own video game or drawing program in 6502 assembler. You had similar articles in similar magazines with the introduction of the IBM PC.

With the advent of the Mac (yes, yes, Xerox did it first), all that bit twiddling disappeared. People started wondering more about how to get windows and menus and buttons to do what they wanted them to do, or even to start developing their own controls.

Fast forward almost 23 years and read just about any blog or magazine that features Ajax articles. The articles are almost universally about nuts and bolts, nitty-gritty details, i.e.:

• Writing a server-side Ajax handler
• Creating souped up popup windows with Javascript
• Implementing fancy form controls in Javascript
• Understanding the DOM

It's bit twiddling all over again. Perhaps it's time to write an article on how to do Sprite animation with Javascript.

Related posts:

1. Two Years of Agile Ajax: Web Killed Off GUI Techniques Just in Time for Ajax to Need them Again
2. Ajax and the “Back” button II
3. Ajax and the “Back” button
4. Direct Manipulation Interfaces, Document-Centric Applications and 7 More Reasons to Use AJAX
5. ASP.NET Ajax Reviews

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