Thu
28
Mar 2024

Technological advancements don't come out of nowhere. They are a sum of many small steps. Video games added interactivity to films displayed on a screen, so we call them "video games". Film, in turn, is a successor of theater, which dates back to the ancient times. No wonder that when we make modern games e.g. using Unreal Engine, we use concepts from the theater and film, like an "actor", "scene", "camera", "light".

What inspired me to write this blog post was my visit at Linen Industry Museum in Żyrardów, a city located not far from Warsaw, Poland. Formerly an industrial hub, Żyrardów now houses a museum dedicated to showcasing the rich history of the linen industry through a collection of preserved machinery and artifacts.

Probably the most interesting for us programmers is the Jacquard machine, which used punched cards to program the pattern to be created on a textile. Punched cards like this later became the medium of storing programs for the first computers. For that machine, it wasn't yet programming in terms of Turing-completeness, but it surely was a digital code that controlled the machine.

It should be no surprise that in modern computer science, we use the term "thread", which comes from the textile industry. Nvidia also uses the term "warp", which is another word from that industry. We can think of a modern GPU as a machine like this one below. There are a lot of threads running in parallel. Each thread produces one pixel of a certain color. Our role as graphics programmers is to make this machine run fast, with no jams, and make sure the correct pattern is produced on the fabric on the computer screen.

So many threads! 😀

(All photos are taken by me in the beforementioned Linen Industry Museum in Żyrardów. If you happen to drive around Warsaw in Poland, make sure to visit it!)

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