Last night I
was browsing the UNIBUS/PDP-11 field guide on the
Web before I went to sleep. Then I dreamed of a VAX 11/785 with
an UNIBUS extension cabinet full of cards. Included was a 3, 4,
5, or so card-set that together comprises a video interface. Hook
up a composite monitor or RGB monitor and there you have it:
A VAX 11/785 as a workstation!
Write a driver for X11R6 for it and off we go. Has anybody ever
seen those UNIBUS video monitor adapter sets? I suppose they
were meant for PDP-11s, but I think running them with a VAX
would be way cooler. Might not be possible, and certainly would
involve some serious fiddling. But in a machine that has 10 or
more cards for just the CPU, a 4 board video adapter would be
the appropriate thing, wouldn't it? :-)
Read up on the VS100. It hooks up the the VAX 11/78x via a fiberoptic
cable. IIRC, this was the original development platform for X11. Warning,
there seems to be very little info available on the VS100.
Well sort of, it wasn't version 11 of X at that time. I'm not sure
which version of X was the first released outside of MIT. We were running X
on VS100's in the 1984/85 time frame. There is an article on X in
ACM Transaction on Graphics around 1986 which would have a lot of
the details on the early versions of X.