Collecting old microprocessors (as opposed to Computers) - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

23 Jun 1997

...
  The reason I liked the 7000 so much was the display.
It used a - I want
 to say NEC 7202 display chip - might be wrong tho. It allowed vector
 graphics and text to share the same screen. You could tell it how much
 text and then anything above that was graphics. It took basically plotting
 commands to do the graphics. Never did understand why that didn't catch
 on! 
That would be the NEC 7220. It was also used in the DEC Rainbow graphics
option; I've not seen a DECmate II graphices option, but I suspect it was
used there as well.

A friend of mine built a video card for an Apple ][ using the 7220. We could
do 1024 x 780, IIRC. He was experimenting with it and a touch screen device
(a flat glas plate to go over the monitor with transducers along two edges;
it put a high-frequency vibration on the glass then listened for echoes) as
a programmable user interface. We were using Microsoft F80 on the Softcard
connected to 8" DSDD diskettes. When does it start being an Apple ][ and start
being a CP/M machine?

Oh yeah; we used a plotting library from a company called Tesseract. Anyone
else used it?

Roger Ivie
ivie(a)cc.usu.edu