These two lines are deeply ingrained in the minds of a whole generation of programmers. They start a graphics mode of size 320x200 with a 256 byte palette and you can start dumping your pixels in the 0xa0000 segment right away.
I am yet to find a modern graphics programming environment that is so comfortable and easy to use as this.
Well your sorta comparing heavyweight OS graphics stack APIs with old school firmware ones. Even so, things like SDL2 are dead simple, one requests a window region and its possible to write bytes to the resulting buffer that show up in a window. That said modern firmware interfaces are still pretty clean. If you write a UEFI hello world, its possible to access the raw frame buffer with just a connection to the GOP, which is just a couple lines of code in C. Its conceptually pretty close to what your describing, except its designed to work with a slightly more modern programming paradigm.
I wouldn't call SDL2 "dead simple", unless sarcastically. Just opening an empty SDL window requires writing about 20 lines of code that deal with several different abstractions, a "window", a "surface", a "renderer, an "event". I only want an array of pixels that I can edit and see the results in realtime. It is of course possible to do that, but it seems ridiculously overcomplicated.
I was taught as a kid to program simple graphical demos using peek and poke in basic. Then in assembler. In either case, stupid me got colored pixels on the screen after a few minutes of work. Kids these days, how do they start? Please, don't tell me "matplotlib" or I will cry myself to sleep.
Its basically, grab a window, show it, grab a render/draw buffer update it and make it visible.
I don't really find the base C version much more complex, although it does have a bit of boilerplate around init/window creation/grab surface/display surface/etc. I'm not sure I would consider that particularly complex. Sure SDL can get complex when you start trying to use GL/etc but if all you want is a buffer to write bytes that become pixels its pretty straightforward IMHO.
I would say its roughly the same level of complexity (if not less) than HTML canvas+JS.
