Jonathan Blow
On The Metal
Doom and It's a WOD File for a Set Top Box
Doom was made to run on PCs right with local disk and these set top boxes didn't have local disk they talked over ethernet to a central server to get files right. Doom would seek back and forth around this file and of course the API for this wasn't an efficient way to do that so if you did a lot of small reads each one was a round trip to the server and back. So I wrote a server that could coalesce all your reads and send it to that thing and it would like do all the reads and package them and send it back to you which is very different from what's today acceptable software quality.
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