9 Oct
2011
9 Oct
'11
11:59 a.m.
On 09/10/11 2:34 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
As far as the price of high-resolution color goes,
we're looking
through the wrong end of the telescope. PCs and associated gear are
cheap now, but hail back to the 1980s. A really functional 5150
(memory, graphics, disk drives included) would probably run close to
$3K. For that you got a 64K 4.77MHz system.
But in fact, as early as 1986, megapixel color cards were offered for
the PC platform--and before 1990, relatively advanced TIGA cards were
offered by several vendors. The PC was beginning to compete with the
high-end workstations and good graphics were a must.
So arguing that color was expensive, is a nonissue. Everything was
expensive, save for the "home" computers such as the Commodore Amiga.
Colour was notably expensive both on the card side and the monitor side,
unless you wanted a really crappy monitor or really crappy
resolution/depth. And I was talking about workstations, because that is
where the NeXT competed. PC/home computer graphics was another, much
more primitive, ballgame entirely, in the 1980s.
What I do credit the Next cube for was the use of Display Postscript,
although it wasn't the first to do that (Sun, IIRC, was)..
Sun didn't use Display PostScript for OpenWindows - but their Network
extensible Windowing System did use PostScript primitives and a version
of the language, which is what you are presumably thinking of. It is
part of OpenWindows 3, and seems unlikely to have predated NEXTSTEP, at
least in general release. Interesting detail - Jim Gosling was, I
believe, responsible for the F3 outline font rasteriser in OpenWindows.
Then he went on to do something else that was better known...
But here we are, in 2011, stuck with X11 on many systems. Better imaging
is one thing Steve Jobs got right, in NEXTSTEP and OS X.
--T
The MO
drive was just plain silly (slooow write, specialized media).
--Chuck