Modern Marvels: Computers ?? no graphics supers

Richard, You are right, they skipped the whole branch of computer evolution where the real scientific computing was done. The computer as an IC and electronics today would not exist without the bootstrap of mainframe based circuit design onto 6800/MIPS. Without Sun, HP, Apollo the next gen CPU ICs could not be placed and routed. Engineers needed to interact in realtime with the design at a graphics workstation to get the job done, to create the IC masks. You could not lay it out in rubylith tape any more. The problem was not the design or architecture, it was interconnect complexity. The autorouters could not connect the logic. (lee's algorithm, later Cooper and Chyan, gridless) Lost, sadly was the machine between then and now, the Graphics Supercomputer. In an effort to add computational speed to graphics and scientific visualazation, two vendors went head to head on this problem, Ardent and Stellar. If you were around at the time, and saw one of these I would love to hear for a couple of years, and it still comes pretty close to current GPU tec in graphics performance. With pipeline vector processor and compiler to unroll loops it was WOW. Todays Ghz processors cannot beat a vector machine in computation, Titan had a 16 Mhz 1K floating point vector ALU. I am currently working with Ardent/Stellar/Stardent Dore' visualization library from these machines. It compiles clean from the freebsd ports collection, and the examples work in xfree86. I have a few Sillicon Graphics Iris and Indys too. Are there any graphics guys on the list? Randy Dawson _________________________________________________________________ With tax season right around the corner, make sure to follow these few simple tips. http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Taxes/PreparationTips/PreparationTips.…