I changed the subject line to something more relevant to
the line of discussion.
> >
> > > > 2) I use these systems to host vintage graphics displays. I
> > > > have an E&S PS390 arriving this week, and I need a host
> > > > for it. I don't intend to leave it in a corner as part
> > > > of a "collection", I intend to have it up and running.
> > >
> > > Hmmm... IIRC the PS390 is a pretty powerful machine in its own right --
> > > there's a 680x0 (68020?) in there and a lot of bit-slice and ASICs. It
> > > also has its own local mass storage (although this might be only floppy
> > > drives). I wonder if it can run 'standalone'? It appears to be a very
> > > impressive display system...
> >
> > The PS300 series was an interesting piece of hardware. The last
> > gasp for vector displays. It stored its display list locally,
>
> I hate to tell you this, but the PS390 is a _raster_ display using a
> conventional colour monitor (the European ones seem to use a Fimi unit, I
> have no idea what was used Stateside).
I'm pretty sure the entire PS300 line were vector displays. Here
in North America is was definitely advertized as a vector display
and they made quite show of the special tube they had produced
that allowed them to do colour. I remember playing with one at
Pixar around 1986, it didn't have any of the aliasing effects
that raster displays of that generation showed.
A number of the vector display manufacturers retrofitted their
vector displays with raster backends in the 1980s. Megatek
was very big on this. They claimed that they could drive both
vector and raster displays from the same graphics engine. Maybe
E&S did the same thing. The people who had used this display
claimed it was vector, and they know their graphics displays.
I'll check it out when it arrives.
The PS 300 line was the end of the line for E&S in the off the
shelf high-end graphics market. SGI basically drove them out
of the market (I still have one of the original SGI workstations
from 1984, but that's in the lab, not at home).
>
> There's a lot of interesting hardware in the box that attempts to
> anti-alias displayed lines (and thus you don't get visible staircasing).
> E&S claimed that this was a raster display that looked like a vector one.
>
> > and all the graphics processing was done locally. There is
> > the possibility to run applications locally, but most were
> > connected to host computers. This was the way they were intended
> > to operate.
>
> Oh, sure. The local processing wasn't _that_ impressive (although the
> built-in programming language looks _strange_), but I suspect they _can_
> be made to run standalone.
>
Actually not all that strange for that time. There were a number
of similar graphics languages, none of them were widely known.
There are standalone applications for it. The RS232 connection
was slow enough to encourage people to develop standalone apps.
Most applications downloaded as much as they could into the PS300,
and then just handled interaction and transformation matrices at
run-time. This resulted in some very strange systems.
--
Dr. Mark Green mark_at_cs.ualberta.ca
Professor (780) 492-4584
Director, Research Institute for Multimedia Systems (RIMS)
Department of Computing Science (780) 492-1071 (FAX)
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2H1, Canada
Received on Sun Oct 17 1999 - 22:35:56 BST