Move source markdown files into src/

src/intro.md

@@ -0,0 +1,90 @@
+---
+title: Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book, Special Edition
+author: Michael Abrash
+date: '1997-07-01'
+identifier:
+- scheme: ISBN
+  text: 1576101746
+publisher: The Coriolis Group
+category: 'Web and Software Development: Game Development,Web and Software Development:
+  Graphics and Multimedia Development'
+---
+
+# Introduction
+
+What was it like working with John Carmack on Quake? Like being strapped
+onto a rocket during takeoff—in the middle of a hurricane. It seemed
+like the whole world was watching, waiting to see if id Software could
+top Doom; every casual e-mail tidbit or conversation with a visitor
+ended up posted on the Internet within hours. And meanwhile, we were
+pouring everything we had into Quake's technology; I'd often come in in
+the morning to find John still there, working on a new idea so
+intriguing that he couldn't bear to sleep until he had tried it out.
+Toward the end, when I spent most of my time speeding things up, I would
+spend the day in a trance writing optimized assembly code, stagger out
+of the Town East Tower into the blazing Texas heat, and somehow drive
+home on LBJ Freeway without smacking into any of the speeding pickups
+whizzing past me on both sides. At home, I'd fall into a fitful sleep,
+then come back the next day in a daze and do it again. Everything
+happened so fast, and under so much pressure, that sometimes I wonder
+how any of us made it through that without completely burning out.
+
+At the same time, of course, it was tremendously exciting. John's ideas
+were endless and brilliant, and Quake ended up establishing a new
+standard for Internet and first-person 3-D game technology. Happily, id
+has an enlightened attitude about sharing information, and was willing
+to let me write about the Quake technology—both how it worked and how it
+evolved. Over the two years I worked at id, I wrote a number of columns
+about Quake in *Dr. Dobb's Sourcebook*, as well as a detailed overview
+for the 1997 Computer Game Developers Conference. You can find these in
+the latter part of this book; they represent a rare look into the
+development and inner workings of leading-edge software development, and
+I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed developing the
+technology and writing about it.
+
+The rest of this book is pretty much everything I've written over the
+past decade about graphics and performance programming that's still
+relevant to programming today, and that covers a lot of ground. Most of
+*Zen of Graphics Programming, 2nd Edition* is in there (and the rest is
+on the CD); all of *Zen of Code Optimization* is there too, and even my
+1989 book *Zen of Assembly Language*, with its long-dated 8088 cycle
+counts but a lot of useful perspectives, is on the CD. Add to that the
+most recent 20,000 words of Quake material, and you have most of what
+I've learned over the past decade in one neat package.
+
+I'm delighted to have all this material in print in a single place,
+because over the past ten years I've run into a lot of people who have
+found my writings useful—and a lot more who would like to read them, but
+couldn't find them. It's hard to keep programming material (especially
+stuff that started out as columns) in print for very long, and I would
+like to thank The Coriolis Group, and particularly my good friend Jeff
+Duntemann (without whom not only this volume but pretty much my entire
+writing career wouldn't exist), for helping me keep this material
+available.
+
+I'd also like to thank Jon Erickson, editor of *Dr. Dobb's*, both for
+encouragement and general good cheer and for giving me a place to write
+whatever I wanted about realtime 3-D. It still amazes me that I was able
+to find time to write a column every two months during Quake's
+development, and if Jon hadn't made it so easy and enjoyable, it could
+never have happened.
+
+I'd also like to thank Chris Hecker and Jennifer Pahlka of the Computer
+Game Developers Conference, without whose encouragement, nudging, and
+occasional well-deserved nagging there is no chance I would ever have
+written a paper for the CGDC—a paper that ended up being the most
+comprehensive overview of the Quake technology that's ever likely to be
+written, and which appears in these pages.
+
+I don't have much else to say that hasn't already been said elsewhere in
+this book, in one of the introductions to the previous volumes or in one
+of the astonishingly large number of chapters. As you'll see as you
+read, it's been quite a decade for microcomputer programmers, and I have
+been extremely fortunate to not only be a part of it, but to be able to
+chronicle part of it as well.
+
+And the next decade is shaping up to be just as exciting!
+
+—*Michael Abrash*\
+ Bellevue, Washington\
+ May 1997