16 Feb
2010
16 Feb
'10
7:38 p.m.
The two companies that springs to my mind here are
Intergraph, who did
CAD systems based on VAXen. They usually based their systems on the
VAX-11/750, but I don't think there was any technical reason that an
11/780 shouldn't be possible as well.
The other is Evans and Sutherland, who specialized in high performance
graphic subsystems. My guess would be that this was some E&S graphic
system, but it's hard to tell, since I never actually saw any of their
stuff in real life. But I think it was/is a whole bunch of cards on the
Unibus, and video cables to a color monitor. And of course input ports
for keyboard and tablet.
There might have been other players around as well.
There were. Off the top of my head there were
Ramtek (systems with a Z80 or 68000 CPU to control them, linked to Unibus
or Qbus)
PPL (who made a system using an analogue hard disk (!) -- the video was
stored usign FM modulation with one track per frame. Of course it was a
fixed-head disk.
Grinnell (?Spel) who made a thing that linked to a DR11-B, I think it was
jsut a dumb framestore, though
I2S (Integrated Imaging Systems), who made image displays with some local
intellegence, board after board of lovely TTL and DRAMs...
-tony