zed@mdbs.uucp (Bill Smith) (10/22/90)
Cruftyness aside, was there a product in the same price/performance range as a Perq with a landscape high-resolution screen? Bill Smith pur-ee!mdbs!zed
henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (10/25/90)
In article <1990Oct22.163604.178@mdbs.uucp> zed@mdbs.uucp (Bill Smith) writes: >Cruftyness aside, was there a product in the same price/performance >range as a Perq with a landscape high-resolution screen? Not right at the instant it was announced. The instant when it was *delivered* was another story. The Sun 1 was announced while people were still waiting for Perq deliveries... and Sun not only delivered the hardware reasonably promptly, they also delivered a real operating system running on it. Performance wasn't as good as the Perq in a number of ways, but a running system always beats a letter postponing delivery yet again. So what if it was a lousy little 68000 with no user-writable microcode, and no fast BitBlt engine, and a kludgey MMU that imposed some annoying restrictions? It ran and you could get one. A lot of Perq purchases got cancelled in favor of Suns. -- The type syntax for C is essentially | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology unparsable. --Rob Pike | henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry
colwell@omews35.intel.com (Robert Colwell) (10/26/90)
In article <1990Oct22.163604.178@mdbs.uucp> zed@mdbs.uucp (Bill Smith) writes: >Cruftyness aside, was there a product in the same price/performance >range as a Perq with a landscape high-resolution screen? Assuming you mean circa 1982 or so, there were none on the market that I knew of, although Apollo's and Sun's came out at about the same that Perq's was ready. Perq had to add a phase-locked-loop to derive the video timing from the CPU timing to make their landscape display, since the bit rates are entirely different for that format (and number of pixels & lines), and the frame buffer was in main memory. That may have been (in retrospect) a bad architectural decision, but it sure was fun being able to watch the OS swap things into memory -- you could actually see the bits on the screen if you mapped your display just right. Getting that PLL to work properly was no picnic. (At the time, I was watching the goings-on from across the lab, since I had an analogous PLL designed into the color system I was designing for them at the time.) In the end, we had to physically isolate a tiny daughter-card from the board so that ground-plane noise from the big board wouldn't introduce noticeable jitter into the displayed pixels. Speaking of high-res, has everyone seen the monitors that MegaScan (a Perq followon) produces? 3K x 4K displays at 70 Hz non-interlaced? Yes, we're talking God's Own BitRates here; the cursor alone has several hundred pixels in it. So moving the cursor involves moving a whole lot more bits than mere workstations ever dreamed of. And imagine the fun of doing bitblts on frame buffers this big. Bob Colwell mipon2!colwell@intel.com 503-696-4550 Intel Corp. JF1-19 5200 NE Elam Young Parkway Hillsboro, Oregon 97124