Interesting Karl Guttag Links

[Willsy]

Jeff posted on one of the TI mailing lists and it turned up some interesting stuff. I thought I'd post a few here:

 

Karl talks some about his days at TI Bedford (England) where the TMS9995 was designed:

 

http://www.kguttag.com/category/tech-history/

 

And, finally, a paper written by Karl in 1980 about the (then) new TMS9918 VDP. Notice that in the paper, the term "sprites" has not yet been coined. Apparantly, the name "sprites" was coined by a collegue of Karl's:

 

"The term “Sprite” was first coined by the 9918 (before that they were call “player graphics” and were less capable than Sprites). I didn’t come up with the name “Sprites,” that term was coined by a manager named David Ackley, but I was one of two engineers that did the sprite architecture and the display processing and I did most of the logic design for the first Sprites."

 

See http://www.kguttag.com/2011/12/06/first-be-useful-home-computers-and-pico-projectors/#more-109

 

Finally, here's the paper written by Karl referenced above.

 

Enjoy.

 

1980_Arizona_Technical_Symposium_Draft.pdf