MaxSpeed VGA MaxStation

Camiel Vanderhoeven camiel.vanderhoeven at vmssoftware.com
Thu Mar 25 03:26:46 CDT 2021


It's been ages since I saw there, but it was definitely graphics; maximum cable length was pretty limited; 12 feet or so. IIRC, the video signal itself was carried over three pairs of wires. Fourth pair of wires was used for bidirectional communications (keyboard, mouse, printer, DAC management). All the box did was generate the video timing signals, and feed the data through the DAC out to the monitor.

On 3/25/21, 4:50 AM, "cctalk on behalf of Cameron Kaiser via cctalk" <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org on behalf of cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

    > So, some months ago, I was in an electronics surplus store and picked
    > up what was obviously an X terminal - tiny metal slab with a VGA
    > connector, serial & parallel, AT keyboard, and RJ45 "communication"
    > port. [...]
    > To throw an extra mysterious wrinkle into this, when I popped open the
    > case to get a look at the PCB, I found that, apart from the CPU, DART,
    > and ROM, the only non-glue ICs on the board were an 8K SRAM and a
    > W82C476 RAMDAC - but 8K isn't even remotely enough for a VGA screen,
    > not even a monochrome one at VGA resolution! Am I missing something on
    > how these things operated?

    It might be text only. There's a mention in InfoWorld 11/18/91: "Maxspeed
    corp. has introduced a controller to connect a 386 or 486 running a
    multiuser operating system to eight of the company's MaxStation base units.
    The $1,495 SH-8 MaxStation Controller is scheduled to ship at the end
    of this month." From that era it could simply be 80x25.

    --
    ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
      Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
    -- If you're not very clever, you should be conciliatory. -- Benjamin Disraeli

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