The TI 34010

From: Derek Peschel <dpeschel_at_u.washington.edu>
Date: Sat Mar 6 03:23:49 1999

> The TI 34020 is the (principally similar) successor to the 34010, and I have
> designed in my company our basic bread-and-butter product of that time
> around that some 7 years ago. This is machine vision, i.e. digital image
> processing.

I've read (I forget where -- maybe Micro Cornucopia) that the 34020 is
basically the same as the 34010, except that it works with larger amounts of
data at the same time. Were there any instruction-set changes?

> I do not think it is advisable to emulate anything. If you want to build the
> Perfect Computer (tm) I would suggest to use Linux as operating system, and
> write your own driver for whatever display hardware you see fit.

:) Well, the number of games on the PC is a very seductive thing.

I think Linux is very good overall. I plan on installing it on my Macintosh
as soon as the quarter (school) is over. But there are some other
interesting OSs too, and many of them are even relevant to the list. I've
heard good things about RSX-11M, RT-11, the various TRS-80 OSs, FLEX, OS-9,
SK*DOS, and others. There was also a competitor to CP/M which has been
praised (possibly by Allison) because it provided some important services
that CP/M didn't. Unfortunately I forget if it was by Northstar, Cromenco,
or Ohio Scientific.

Admittedly, many of those are simpler than UNIX. But a few are real-time,
which UNIX is not. Besides, almost any design is interesting in some way.

I also have visions of putting together a Transputer-based system and
somehow creating vast amounts of computer power out of thin air. :) From
my reading, it seems there are two main drawbacks: 1) Generally, the
Transputer depends on a host. 2) Parallel processors are very powerful but
they won't solve every problem equally well, and they present some very
subtle and nasty traps to the student or programmer. Maybe it's time for
Tony to come back into this thread, since he seems to be the Transputer
expert.

> faster on the TI 340x0. The basic thing to know is that in those days people
> were most concerned about putting graphics display lists on the screen,
> that is you have a list of triangles, lines, circles, and whatnot, and the
> hardware primitives (really microcode of course) on the TI 340x0 allow you
> to do that pretty efficiently.

I understand display lists pretty well. Many vector-graphics machines used
them; Sketchpad relied on them and Evans & Sutherland continued the trend.
(I'd love to play with some of their machines!)

Also the Atari 8-bit machines had a limited form, and you could say the
Amiga has them as well. This kind of dipslay list relates to memory layout
and interpretation, rather than defining objects in memory. But it still
makes certain tasks absurdly easy, instead of very time-consuming.

> That in other word means, that _ON_ _THE_ _APPLICATION_ _LEVEL_
> you must be prepared to hand DISPLAY LISTS over to the graphcis processor;
> in those times, that was done by people like AutoCad, e.g.

How does the 34010 do in handling bitmaps?

-- Derek
Received on Sat Mar 06 1999 - 03:23:49 GMT