On 12/10/06, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote: Not really a graphics chip per se, but a general-purpose DSP, though AFAIK it was primarily laid out for telecom purposes. I may be biased though, that's where I've seen it used :-) Only marginally. By the time I did actually some code in telecom industry (Hello to all ex-Newbridge Ottawa people!) I was working with the C050 - and even that one was strining under the workload of just a few channel at 8kHz sampling rate for applications such as G.729 coding or echo cancellation. The C010 in comparison was VERY limited. I have the manual for it at my office acually, and my boss has an old board (including POTS interface bits) with it on it. I'm toying with the idea of putting on some of my own code on it, just for old time's sake... Joe.

Richard wrote: I worked at a start up called ShoGraphics, 1991-1993. I have a lot of stories about the place, but that is another topic. ShoGraphics made an xterm with hardware accelerated PEX (Phigs Extension for X). Here is a link that google coughed up: http://calbears.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EKF/is_n1918_v38/ai_124309… It sported an i960 for networking, one i860 for control and optionally two more i860s for more beefy geometry acceleration, and mostly custom hardware for rasterization. The prototype hardware had a 34020 that acted as an asynchronous bridge between the i860 CPU and the framebuffer to allow the i860 to do dumb pixel manipulation for low end machines that lacked the rasterization hardware. However, it was a dog, at least in this system. On screen clears you could watch the "wipe" effect. To be fair, the 34020 wasn't doing any work other than video timing control and passing memory read and write requests to the framebuffer. The designer had abstractly theorized that much of the x server software could be moved over to the 34020, but the software team wasn't too keen on supporting two different processors. I redesigned the framebuffer board and made the connection between the i860 and the framebuffer synchronous, and added support for using the block write mode of the VRAM. Problem solved. BTW, the rasterizer did gouraud shading at two pixels per clock at 40 MHz. The framebuffer logic was responsible for checking the window ID plane (8b) and doing the Z buffer compare and update. The framebuffer was 80b deep. Not too bad for 1992. The system was wildly expensive as compared to the SGI Indigo, which had the advantage of using ASICs instead of TTL.

Richard wrote: I was at work one afternoon when the sheriff came to the door and announced they would be back on the following monday with chains and padlocks and that we should remove any of our personal belongings. There was a hasty auction of lab tools and furniture and who knows what came of the rest of it. One of the software developers bought a system for a song, but as far as I know, he was the only one who bothered. Even though I had some of my own blood, sweat, and tears in the system, I have little nostalgia for that one. It was a poorly run company that deserved to die.

I remember there being a product by AT & T which was capable of manipulationg "microdots" (micropels?, thereby creating screen resolutions much greater then was common in those days. It was a boardset and may have been built around the 34010 (not sure about that though - I think the product was called Targa, and I could have confused Targa and TIGA). ____________________________________________________________________________________ Need a quick answer? Get one in minutes from people who know. Ask your question on www.Answers.yahoo.com

On Dec 10, 2006, at 10:41 PM, Richard wrote: I'm in the same boat...I drooled over it quite a bit, I think I even have a 340x0-family databook somewhere. Maybe I'll throw something together with one someday. It really did look like a neat chip. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Cape Coral, FL

In article <m1Gtq9a-000IytC at p850ug1>, ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) writes: I don't think its so early; the earliest X terminals used custom monitor, mouse and keyboard connections. They didn't start using standard VGA/PS2 style connections until the mid to late 90s. By this point, *noone* uses a weird monitor/keyboard/mouse connection for the "thin client" style boxes. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

In article <m1GuCik-000IytC at p850ug1>, ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) writes: Oh, interesting...how does it boot? Server in ROM or loaded via tftp, etc.? Yes, that sounds more of the period :-). -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

In article <m1GuER6-000IytC at p850ug1>, ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) writes: Yes, that would be interesting! To me, anyway :). -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>