Digital Video for the Desktop

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The NewDesktopHardware

When I set out to write my first book on digital graphic design in 1992, the shiny new state-of-the-art machine I was using at that time sported a 50 MHz processor, a 400 Mb hard drive, 16 Mb of RAM and a graphics card which could display 16 bit colour at a resolution of 800 × 600 pixels. A few short years later, the machine I used to write Digital Video for the Desktop has a 400 MHz processor, an 11.3 Gb Ultra DMA hard drive, 256 Mb of SDRAM, a graphics card with 8 Mb of on-board video RAM capable of displaying 32 bit colour at resolutions greater than I could ever use, a DVD ROM drive and a 16 bit stereo sound card – all at a cost considerably less than that of its predecessor in real terms – and this machine ...