Modern Marvels: Computers ?? no graphics supers

In article <BAY120-F35B55A58C25AAA4E54FD1ABA7F0 at phx.gbl>, "Randy Dawson" <rdawson16 at hotmail.com> writes: Not just SGI, but ATI as well. Basically the hardware designers at lots of graphics outfits left the mainframe/minicomputers/workstation companies to go work for PC graphics card companies. Its interesting that the employees can adapt to the change in technology, but the organizations and companies seem stuck. This wouldn't be the first time that a company didn't survive a change in the computing platform. DEC seemd to do OK when workstations hit the scene, but seemed to totally miss it when PCs hit the scene. SGI had a PC product very early on and found the results "disappointing" when compared to workstations, but that misses the point entirely. At the time it still would have run rings around other comparable PC offerings. As a result they abandoned the PC platform as a company until it was too late to be the dominant player. Hell, missing market opportunities is the whole story of why E&S is now down to 60 employees and circling the drain for what seems one last time. They *were* delisted. They were relisted later. After 9/11 they got a financial shot in the arm due to a spurt in supercomputer business, but it wasn't enough to restart the company, really. See <http://www.gpgpu.org/> Is this just the API or do you have a machine? I knew a guy that left E&S to go work for Kubota Pacific when they started up -- Kent was his first name, I am drawing a blank on his last name right now... He worked on the microcode for the Evans & Sutherland Freedom series of graphics accelerators that were made for Sun, HP and IBM machines. The microcode was written for the AMD 29000 processor. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>