my vintage Christmas present

Back in the early 90s, I rescued some equipment from work that was being discarded. This is where I got my ESV/50 and my ARS (Advanced Rendering System) and other E&S bits. At some later time, a former E&S coworker really wanted a board out of the ARS as a keepsake because he worked on it. Since I had not powered up/connected my ARS to my ESV even once and I wasn't yet totally smitten by the "collecting bug", I sent him the board. Since then I have regretted that a little bit because this board wasn't optional in the ARS, there is only one of these boards as it houses the main processor array. However, I also rescued some equipment that I gave to another former E&S coworker. As time went by, he decided that he wanted to get rid of his equipment and asked me if I wanted it. Since E&S equipment is as rare as hen's teeth, I immediately said yes. Well, we went over after Christmas on a sunny Saturday afternoon and picked up the gear. He had an ESV/10 Workstation (a smaller version of my ESV/50), a Freedom 3000 accelerator and an ARS! Now the ARS is probably the biggest baddest piece of iron that the Workstation Division of Evans & Sutherland ever produced. Its a fairly large box, about the size of a deskside SGI Onyx if you're familiar with that. Except its not a whole computer, its just a peripheral! Its whole purpose is to render photorealistic images at full screen resolution in just a few seconds. It has hardware antialiasing, hardware texture mapping, environment mapping and reflection mapping. In the late 80s/early 90s this was pretty hot shit although now you can get it on a cheapo $100 graphics card for your PC. (To many of you, this will be a familiar refrain!) Now that I have a 2nd ARS, I can get one back in working condition. Its a rather unique beasty, considering that only one piece of software (CDRS, the "Conceptual Design and Rendering System") ever supported the ARS. The primary customers of CDRS were car companies doing auto body design. Therefore you had to do high quality renderings that showed how the reflections and gloss would look on the painted car body in order to satisfy the customer. Customers for CDRS were a "who's who" of the car industry at the time: Ford, Chrysler, Daimler-Benz, Harley-Davidson, Renault and I'm sure some others I'm forgetting. If I get the ARS back in working order, then its quite possible that I will have the only working ARS on the planet, unless there are still some kicking around the automotive companies. -- "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/>