Collecting old microprocessors (as opposed to Computers)

From: Roger Ivie <IVIE_at_cc.usu.edu>
Date: Mon Jun 23 22:06:44 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_at_cc.usu.edu
Received on Mon Jun 23 1997 - 22:06:44 BST