Vector Imagery

zillions of years ago, when I was an undergrad, I did some work for the university geology department. They had a litle PDP-11 with dual floppies which ran RT-11. It had a nice ADC board from Data Transalation and a scope with D-to-A. The unit was originally designed to sample some sort of data and display the results on the scope. For a senior project I made a bridge and connected a strain gauge to the ADC and wrote code to sample the data over time, do some simple transformations and plot the data on the scope. The used it to measure particle size distributions in a slurry tube. All I rememeber is that everything had great documentation, the scope was an off the shelf o-scope and I was suprised that just controlling x, y, "z" (beam) I could plot numbers and dots on the screen and it looked pretty good. I don't remember but I suspect the cpu was just a little qbus 11/03 and everything was written in fortran. anyway, once done with the project I couldn't resist and wrote a spacewar game. It worked great and became very popular with the grad students. so popular that the dept head eventually hid all the disks with the program on it because nothing was going on except a spacewar tournament :-) my point is that I was suprised how well a little '11 could do with fortran code and a (I presume) a very linear ADC. The game ran ran well and was very fluid. wish i'd saved the source code... (but it wasn't very complex) I would guess that a simple parallel port adc on a PC could do very well displaying a reasonable number of dots on a scope with intensity control... not very impressive given what fpga's do now shading polygons, but fun none the less. -brad