17 Oct
1999
17 Oct
'99
3:35 p.m.
I changed the subject line to something more relevant to
the line of discussion.
The PS300 series was an interesting piece of hardware. The last
gasp for vector displays. It stored its display list locally,
I hate to tell you this, but the PS390 is a _raster_ display using a
conventional colour monitor (the European ones seem to use a Fimi unit, I
have no idea what was used Stateside).
I'm pretty sure the entire PS300 line were vector displays. Here
in North America is was definitely advertized as a vector display
and they made quite show of the special tube they had produced
that allowed them to do colour. I remember playing with one at
Pixar around 1986, it didn't have any of the aliasing effects
that raster displays of that generation showed.
A number of the vector display manufacturers retrofitted their
vector displays with raster backends in the 1980s. Megatek
was very big on this. They claimed that they could drive both
vector and raster displays from the same graphics engine. Maybe
E&S did the same thing. The people who had used this display
claimed it was vector, and they know their graphics displays.
I'll check it out when it arrives.
The PS 300 line was the end of the line for E&S in the off the
shelf high-end graphics market. SGI basically drove them out
of the market (I still have one of the original SGI workstations
2) I use
these systems to host vintage graphics displays. I
have an E&S PS390 arriving this week, and I need a host
for it. I don't intend to leave it in a corner as part
of a "collection", I intend to have it up and running.
Hmmm... IIRC the PS390 is a pretty powerful machine in its own right --
there's a 680x0 (68020?) in there and a lot of bit-slice and ASICs. It
also has its own local mass storage (although this might be only floppy
drives). I wonder if it can run 'standalone'? It appears to be a very
impressive display system... from 1984, but that's in the lab, not at home).
There's a lot of interesting hardware in the box that attempts to
anti-alias displayed lines (and thus you don't get visible staircasing).
E&S claimed that this was a raster display that looked like a vector one.
Actually not all that strange for that time. There were a number
of similar graphics languages, none of them were widely known.
There are standalone applications for it. The RS232 connection
was slow enough to encourage people to develop standalone apps.
Most applications downloaded as much as they could into the PS300,
and then just handled interaction and transformation matrices at
run-time. This resulted in some very strange systems.
--
Dr. Mark Green mark(a)cs.ualberta.ca
Professor (780) 492-4584
Director, Research Institute for Multimedia Systems (RIMS)
Department of Computing Science (780) 492-1071 (FAX)
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2H1, Canada
and all the graphics processing was done locally.
There is
the possibility to run applications locally, but most were
connected to host computers. This was the way they were intended
to operate.
Oh, sure. The local processing wasn't _that_ impressive (although the
built-in programming language looks _strange_), but I suspect they _can_
be made to run standalone.