Aquarius (was Re: Apple 1)

[Al Kossow]

On 6/14/20 9:36 PM, Cameron Kaiser via cctalk wrote:
>>> He didn't know of anyone doing much other with it either.__ I think it was
>>> bought before there was a unix type OS under the Macos.
>>
>> https://wiki.c2.com/?AppleCrayComputer
>>
>> They bought it to use to design the next Macintosh CPU I thought
> 
> That would be Aquarius.
> 
> https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2019/12/and-now-for-something-completely_29.html
> 

"was brought in by Apple as outside expertise to try to rescue Aquarius."

Actually, Al was hired as an Apple Fellow in 1985. His first project was "Trojan"
a 68000 mac on an ISA card that mixed EGA and square pixel Mac video. I was the
Mac-side programmer on the project. Marketing killed it before it got from ATG
to product development.

The justification for the Cray was to experiment with what could be done if you
had a Macintosh with the power of a Cray. It had a pretty fancy frame buffer
attached to it and some pretty sophisticated anti-aliased rendering was produced.

About the only video I know that escaped from Valley Green 3 was the title and
end credits for "Pencil Test" which weren't produced on a Mac, they were done
on the Cray (I was the person responsible for pulling all of the frame sequences
together from the Mac II distributed render farm and generating the D1 tape).