Accelerator boards - no future? Bad business?

[Fred Cisin]

On Fri, 22 Apr 2016, Eric Christopherson wrote:
> I like the new types of peripherals but it makes me a little uncomfortable
> knowing that e.g. in the case of the uIEC-SD for Commodores, the clock
> speed of the peripheral is 16 to 20 times that of the original host CPU. I
> keep hatching little schemes of perhaps putting a tiny OS kernel in the
> thing, but at that point *it* would become the computer and the 128 would
> be just sort of sitting there. The same is true of the CosmosEx device I've
> been thinking of getting for my Atari STs; it has a Raspberry Pi inside.

I heard at the time, that the Apple Laserwriter was the "most powerful" 
machine that they made, and that certain people were connecting terminals 
to it and programming in Postscript.  I did some trivial programming in 
Postscript, but didn't have a Laserwriter.  It was a stack based language, 
with similarities to Forth.   I suspect that the "terminals" were actually 
terminal emulation in whichever machines were currently connected anyway.

I made a company logo that was outline letters with a fill of lines 
radiating from a point (think about Moire pattern artifacts when pushing 
the resolution limits).  Then I found that the "Freedom Of Press" 
Postscript emulation of the commercial large format printer was too slow, 
and did not have a large enough stack space.  (whilst other deadlines were 
looming).