X Window server for NEC 7220

On 08/12/2012 03:47 AM, Eric Smith wrote: As one of the product team for NEC at the time that's correct. One has to remember the introduction of the part in 1981 predates the IBM PC. The world at the time was 8bit busses (z80 common, 6502, or 8088 emerging). It had the needed bits for a dynamic ram interface for large arrays (megabit sized). Odddly at the time displays were also a limitation for both resolution as pixels per scan (video bandwidth) line and number of scan lines(limited by spot size and vertical scan systems). Also at the time the 64K Dram was a new and very expensive part plus it was not all that fast either. In fact the fastest ram was the 2147 (1kx4) and 2167 (16kx1) and they were scarce and expensive for the fastest 35ns part. te standard part was 55ns! Oddly the next generation of large displays (1024x1024 or color in that or larger) would all be handled by the cpu (32bit) to a memory map. That was the workstation era with the SPARC, MIPS, ARM, and VAX, CPUs. Intelligent display controllers were late 90s for common reappearance. I used to call on Cyron and a few of the other houses in the northeast that did high end graphics display systems. The boxes of the time were large, typically 6-12 VME or double height Multibus sized cards and many were full custom size boards with 2900 based hardware, and lots of DRAM. Allison