Graphics Engine cover
March 8, 2011
In graduate school my roommate Rob Wheeler and I took a computer architecture class from Fred Brooks. The final project was to design your own architecture. We designed a graphics co-processor modeled loosely on the internal architecture of the Nintendo 64. (I was an intern at SGI the previous summer on that project.)
I still had the PDF of the paper, so it was just a matter of creating a nice cover. (The PDF was 8½″×11″. I would have preferred 6″×9″, but I couldn't get the LaTeX to run again. Some old package I had used was no longer available.)
I wrote a Java program to generate a giant image for the cover (5220×3375). I took the colors from an image on the front page of the Lulu website. The gears came from a program I was writing at the time to make a pendulum clock. The cover also includes bits of assembly and an architecture diagram, both from the book.
I printed the book using Lulu, which worked great. I think it was about $10 to print.