19 Apr
2006
19 Apr
'06
1:33 a.m.
Richard wrote:
OK, what's the earliest graphics display system held by any of you
collectors?
"graphics display system" is anything that creates a graphics image
with a display: calligraphic, storage tube, plasma, raster, etc.
Block character graphics don't count (or I would include my Commodore
CBM 8032 and all the stupid terminals :).
My timeline goes like this, based on year introduced:
196?: Evans & Sutherland PS-300 terminal
197?: Tektronix 4010 terminal
1974: Tektronix 4014 terminal
1977: Hewlett-Packard 2648A terminal
Hewlett-Packard 1350A graphics translator
1979: Atari 800 microcomputer
1981: IBM PC CGA microcomputer
1983: Televideo TS-803 microcomputer
1984: Megatek Whizzard 1645 terminal
Diser Eve workstation
1984?: Tektronix 4105 terminal
1985: Sun 3/110 workstation
1986: Hewlett-Packard 2397A terminal
1988: NCD 14p X terminal
1989: Evans & Sutherland ESV workstation
1991: Evans & Sutherland Freedom accelerator
1993: SGI Indigo^2 workstation
Well, it's not like I have either of these in my possession, but perhaps they
count for additions to the list:
- early 50s: Whirlwind had a large CRT display attached to it, which would
become the graphics displays of the SAGE system.
Other machines of the era had CRTs attached for things like monitoring memory
accesses / machine state, but I suspect the Whirlwind display was the first
CRT display for actual graphical presentation of programmed output.
- circa 1980: The Comtal Colour Image Processing System (another piece of
equipment I haven't seen mentioned in many years). A desk sized unit with a
giant wire-wrapped backplane and CCD memory. Had an RGB monitor for display,
keyboard and trackball, and also connected to a host computer. I don't know
too many details but it could do various transformations and manipulations on
raster-based images that it held in the CCD memory, in real-time. Kind of like
the predecessor to the video-graphics-chip sitting between the main processor
and the screen of today's computers.