On Mon, 21 Dec 1998, Tony Duell wrote: AFAIK, the PS-300 was only capable of drawing vectors. If there was a facility to draw bit maps, I never used it, and it seems silly to make an anti-aliasing raster display system that could only do vectors. I also occassionly used an earlier PS-2 that belonged to a guy named Livingston who did a somewhat famous film about brains using his (vector graphics) PS. I think the PS-300 came out just as Silicon Graphics got into the game, and that pretty much marked the end of vector-only displays. -- Doug

On Mon, 21 Dec 1998, Tony Duell wrote: You may be right. Then again, I may be right. Or we might both be right. Here's a nice picture of a PS300 with a caption that mentions both a vector display and a raster display (I think the little one in the middle is a dumb terminal): http://www.inflab.bme.hu/hist/pictures/esps300pic.html In any case, it was the dataflow software architecture that I found interesting about the machine, and it reminds me of a hardware question that you or some other hardware guru can help me with. I found a dataflow language intriguing because it makes it clear what processes can run in parallel. Everything is asynchronous and event driven, which maps nicely to the real world and even maps well to modern GUIs and operating systems. So, why are all modern CPUs synchronous? Does a clock buy you anything besides simplicity? Why not let logic run as fast as it can and add sync points as required, the way nature intended. -- Doug