17 Oct
2008
17 Oct
'08
7:50 a.m.
And thusly were the wise words spake by Jules Richardson
Richard wrote:
Even the Commodore PET had an addon board made by Micro Technology
Unlimited that gave it a 320 x 200 bitmap display.
Cheers,
Bryan
In article <48F783F8.1030000 at
brouhaha.com>,
Eric Smith <eric at brouhaha.com> writes:
*Ahh* - so the question is "what was the first computer with a display for
displaying computer graphics", rather than "what was the first graphical
display for a computer"? I think I see where we're going wrong, as the two do
potentially have a subtly different meaning...
Having said that, I'm willing to bet some engineer somewhere wrote some code
specifically for displaying a graphical image on the earliest hardware even if
the output device in question was supposed to just be a debugging aid*.
Finding evidence of that might be rather tricky though - probably locked away
in some long-forgotten book in a museum archive somewhere. I'm not sure it
would meet your criteria anyway.
Richard wrote
No. I'm saying that I want to see some evidence that Whirlwind had
such a display *before* SAGE was envisioned and that it was used for
computer graphics like tasks (not for showing waveforms for test and
debugging of the hardware) driven by software. Whirlwind was used in prototyping SAGE after it
was built. However, I
don't consider that to "predate SAGE" as its just part of the SAGE
design effort.
That's like claiming that the MX-774 ICBM was just part of the Apollo
spacecraft design effort. * The temptation would surely be there. It's right
up there with playing music
using printers, disk drive heads etc. :-)
cheers
Jules