Sean Caron wrote:
[stuff deleted]
> 3. There was an interesting looking Evans & Sutherland computer there
> labeled as an ES-3. I popped the front cover off of it and it looked
> relatively sophisticated, but I didn't actually pull any boards and
> get a good look at them since they don't like people doing that sort
> of thing there at the warehouse. I read somewhere that this box runs
> UNIX and had some pretty nice graphics capabilities for its time. Does
> anyone know much about these (e.g. architechture, history, OS
> specifics, etc)? Does anyone know how they stacked up to SGIs of the
> era and similar competing machines? The thing's kind of heavy and
> transportation to and from the warehouse is pretty evil for me, but
> if its a really nifty machine, I'd like to save it (I've certainly
> never seen one before). Unfortunately there didn't seem to be any
> monitor, keyboard, or mouse included with it. Does anyone know any
> specifics about these either?
I don't have specifics on the ES-3, but E&S more or less created
the field of extremely high-performance real-time graphics for
large-scale real-time simulations -- things like bridge simulators
for warships, real-time scene generation for combat aircraft
simulators and the like. I don't believe E&S ever made a general
purpose computer, almost all of their stuff is attached or embedded
processors with architectures optimized for real-time scene generation
based on abstract display primitives (a need at E&S for a way to
describe graphic objects independent of hardware is the claimed genesis
of Postscript).
I'd bet you're looking at some sort of image pipeline processor
(as in a pipeline of images, not a pipelined processor in a
traditional sense) that was designed to drive some sort of high
resolution device, either a display projector (or a set of them)
or a film printer (or something like).
--
Chris Kennedy
chris_at_mainecoon.com
http://www.mainecoon.com
PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97
Received on Thu Jan 24 2002 - 19:00:43 GMT