24 Jan
2002
24 Jan
'02
11 a.m.
Sean Caron wrote:
[stuff deleted]
3. There was an interesting looking Evans &
Sutherland computer there
labeled as an ES-3. I popped the front cover off of it and it looked
relatively sophisticated, but I didn't actually pull any boards and
get a good look at them since they don't like people doing that sort
of thing there at the warehouse. I read somewhere that this box runs
UNIX and had some pretty nice graphics capabilities for its time. Does
anyone know much about these (e.g. architechture, history, OS
specifics, etc)? Does anyone know how they stacked up to SGIs of the
era and similar competing machines? The thing's kind of heavy and
transportation to and from the warehouse is pretty evil for me, but
if its a really nifty machine, I'd like to save it (I've certainly
never seen one before). Unfortunately there didn't seem to be any
monitor, keyboard, or mouse included with it. Does anyone know any
specifics about these either?
I don't have specifics on the ES-3, but E&S more or less created
the field of extremely high-performance real-time graphics for
large-scale real-time simulations -- things like bridge simulators
for warships, real-time scene generation for combat aircraft
simulators and the like. I don't believe E&S ever made a general
purpose computer, almost all of their stuff is attached or embedded
processors with architectures optimized for real-time scene generation
based on abstract display primitives (a need at E&S for a way to
describe graphic objects independent of hardware is the claimed genesis
of Postscript).
I'd bet you're looking at some sort of image pipeline processor
(as in a pipeline of images, not a pipelined processor in a
traditional sense) that was designed to drive some sort of high
resolution device, either a display projector (or a set of them)
or a film printer (or something like).
--
Chris Kennedy
chris(a)mainecoon.com
http://www.mainecoon.com
PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97