"e.stiebler" <emu at e-bbes.com> wrote:
Johnny Billquist wrote:
And I dare say, that picture have higher
resolution, and more depth than
my simple calculation above used.
No, it should be just 512x512x8. Don't forget that you are watching
youtube in a lousy resolution.
You are right. She even says in the beginning that it's 250,000 pixels.
Assuming they take a little liberties to simplify things, that would
mean 512x512.
Looking at the first perspective city picture, you can see that he has a
palette of 256 shades to blue to pick from (ranging from black to white).
It might be that the graphic system have a color palette then, since
obviously, there are other colors than blue possible, but none others
are shown there.
Or else they have a 24 bit pixel depth, which would be very impressive.
But any way you look at it, my comment still stands. With a serial line
running at 19200 bps, it would take about two and a half minute to draw
a picture, at the best of time.
I dare say we can safely assume it's not a serially connected terminal
(even ignoring that I don't think I've ever seen or heard of a serial
terminal with bitmap graphics with a resolution close to this).
Looking more at the video. There are no visible clues at all that I can
see as to who actually manufactured the graphics system. The system
definitely are running some kind of Unix, though.
Anyone who recognize the tablet? It is after all in focus quite a lot.
And we used a grinell system 1981 already (pdp11)
which had 512x256 (not
sure it was 512x512). 8 bit is sufficient to show what he is doing on it.
Never heard of grinell.
But I have a VSV21 here. 640x480 pixel resolution. Unfortunately only 4
bitplanes. But it's a very fun graphic system for the PDP11 anyway...
And later than 1981, but made by DEC. Oh, and that's for the Q-bus...
Unibus graphic systems are rarer...
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol